News Articles

Listcast acquired by MailerMailer

Listcast, an email list management service, has been acquired. MailerMailer will take over management and support of all Listcast customers effective immediately from Domainate, Inc.

Spam isn't a best practice

I’m hearing a lot of claims about best practices recently and I’m wondering what people really mean by the term. All too often people tell me that they comply with “all best practices” followed by a list of things they do that are clearly not best practices.
Some of those folks are clients or sales prospects but some of them are actually industry colleagues that have customers sending spam. In either case, I’ve been thinking a lot about best practices and what we all mean when we talk about best practices. In conversing with various people it’s clear that the term doesn’t mean what the speakers think it means.
For me, best practice means sending mail in a way that create happy and engaged recipients. There are a lot of details wrapped up in there, but all implementation choices stem from the answer to the question “what will make our customers happy.” But a lot of marketers, email and otherwise, don’t focus on what makes their recipients or targets happy.
In fact, for many people I talk to when they say “best practice” what they really mean is “send as much mail as recipients will tolerate.” This isn’t that surprising, the advertising and marketing industries survive by pushing things as far as the target will tolerate (emphasis added).

Beware: Phishing and Spam in Social Networks

Trend Micro warns us today about how spam and phishing can hit you even in the closed ecosystem of a social networking system such as Facebook. Malware abounds. And in the social network arena, just like anywhere else, “using your account to send spam” is a common thing for the bad guys to want to do.
In Rik Ferguson’s investigation (which I read about on CNet News), he came across a link to a URL that asked for his Facebook credentials, supposedly necessary to allow installation of a specific Facebook application. Once the credentials were handed over, the app immediately spammed all of his Facebook friends, sending them a bogus notification, attempting to draw them into visiting the phishing/malware URL, with (one assumes) the hope of spreading the infection even wider.
He’s a researcher for Trend Micro, so he knows what he’s doing. But for the rest of us, this highlights how necessary it is to be careful with who you give your usernames and passwords to. In my opinion, it’s never safe to take your username and password from one site and hand it over to another site. Some social networking make the problem even worse by blurring the lines between safe and unsafe by asking for usernames and passwords to third party accounts, but you just can never know with 100% certainty which sites are legitimate and which ones aren’t.
— Al Iverson

McColo goes offline

Last week a major player in the botnet arena was taken offline when they were shutdown by their upstream provider. With the demise of McColo, there has been a 30 – 50% drop in the amount of spam as measured by any number of different techniques. The CBL team has posted an article about their view of the McColo disconnection, which includes links to press articles about the shutdown. Spamhaus has their own take on the shutdown and another collection of links to articles about the shutdown.
In my own mailbox, I have noticed a drastic decrease in the amount of spam over the last week. I am too jaded to expect that the change is permanent, but it is nice while it lasts.

Followup to EEC spamming

Ken has a followup to his article last week about the EEC spamming.

FTC Rulemaking on CAN SPAM

The FTC announced today they will be publishing clarifications to CAN SPAM in the near future. According to the FTC

Links

Venkat posts today about the ruling in the Asis v. Azoogle case. I have not yet had a chance to read the whole ruling, but in talking with Mickey over at SpamSuite it seems to expand the Gordon ruling a bit.
Mickey posts on Intellectual Intercourse about spam received from a recruiting agency trying to get him to hire one of their clients. This spam was amusing in that it contained reference to a bill that Mickey helped defeat years ago.
Box of Meat blog links to a CSO online article graphically demonstrating a botnet. The representation is really helps to understand the scope of the problem.
On Bronto Blog DJ posts about resurrecting old addresses. He has it right when he says: “If you continue to send email to customers that is random and unexpected, there will be consequences.”
Matt at ReturnPath has a couple posts about who should get delivery services and how ReturnPath chooses customers. This is something I end up dealing with occasionally. There are not specific types of companies I refuse to do consulting for. I will generally provide consulting on best practices to any business segment. My one restriction is that I will not provide ISP relations (ie, contacting the ISPs) for companies that do not send opt-in email. This has caused consternation with some potential customers.
Mark Brownlow at No Man is an iland suggests renaming “open rate” as “render rate” in an effort to make it much clearer what “open rates” really measure. Expect to see render rates referred to here on this blog in the future.
Josh talks about suppression list abuse on Deliverability.com. For those of us who use unique addresses for every signup, it quickly becomes clear that there are leaks in the suppression process. I have also seen problems with leaks from subscriptions, so do not think the problem is just in suppressions.

EEC shows how not to send email

The Email Experience Council is the email marketing arm of the Direct Marketing Association. They recently sent out a mailing that demonstrated what not to do when sending email, including:

Spammers in the news

Eddie Davidson was sentenced yesterday to 21 months in jail for falsifying headers and tax evasion.
Sanford Wallace (the spammer that prompted me to start figuring out how to read headers) lost his suit with MySpace for failure to comply with court orders and failing to turn over documents.
Scott and Steve Richter are in the Washington Post today in an article discussing hijacked IP space. Reading the Post article, though, it appears that Scott legitimately bought a business with a /16 and there is no hijacking going on. Spammers have hijacked IP space illegitimately in the past, but this does not seem to be the case.

Finding your relevancy

Ken Magill reported today that Responsys has unveiled a tool to measure the relevancy of email marketing programs. This tool is intended to help marketers implement the advice “be more relevant.”

Blog roundup

Denise Cox has a list of 10 things your signup page should have over on her blog.
The AOL postmaster blog has its first post up talking about bounces.
BeRelevant has a great blog with lots of suggestions email best practices.
Mark Brownlow had a great post this weekon moving the unsubscribe button to the top of your newsletter to make it easy for customers to unsubscribe. The comments are a must read as well, including one commenter that saw the number of ‘this is spam’ hits go down when he moved the unsubscribe link to the top of the email.

Ken speaks the truth

Ken Magill has a great article up today about how many marketers expect their ESPs to fix their delivery problems when in reality the marketers policies and practices are the real problem.

e360 in court again

Today’s edition of Magilla Marketing announced that Dave Linhardt and e360 have sued Comcast. Spamsuite.com has the text of the complaint up.
On the surface this seems quite silly. e360 is alleging a number of things, including that Comcast is committing a denial of service attack against e360 and locking up e360’s servers for more than 5 hours. Additionally, e360 is laying blame at the feet of multiple spam filtering companies, including Spamhaus, Trend Micro and Brightmail.
One of the more absurd claims is that Comcast is fraudulently transmitting ‘user unknown’ messages. At no point do they explain how or why they think this is the case, but simply assert:

Al Ralsky Indicted

Al Ralsky is a very prolific spammer and his name is well known among ISP abuse desks. Along with 10 other people he was indicted today after a 2 year investigation by the Justice Department, according to an article published today by the Detroit Free Press.

Email Marketing for Dummies

Mark Brownlow has an interview with the author of Email Marketing For Dummies. It is a great summary of the book and gives some good hints to anyone interested in starting to use email as a marketing and customer retention tool.

Best practices and ISPs

A couple articles came out today talking about ISP requirements and how to find them.
EmailInsider talks about ISP best practices and how merely complying with CAN-SPAM is not enough to get good delivery at the ISPs.
Meanwhile, over at ClickZ, Stefan talks about what the ISPs want from you and how to find the information online.

News and articles

Things have been insanely busy the last few days so blogging has been light. I do have links to a few news articles though. ClickZ has a report on the benefits they saw when switching to a professional email service provider. ReturnPath talks about changes to the email landscape as we enter the holiday shopping season. Terry Zink talks about how he measures the effectiveness of filters. A commenter on this blog asked about how to improve delivery to AOL, and I should have an answer to that in a few days.

How to improve AOL delivery

DMNews interviewed Charles before he left AOL about the state of spam and the challenges for ISPs and how that affects senders. The article was published this week. In it he talks about

Do open rates matter?

Ken Magill over at DirectMag has an article deriding the reliance on ‘open rates’ as a metric for the success (or failure!) of marketing campaigns.

Yahoo blocks unauthenticated PayPal and eBay Mail

Yahoo announced this morning that over the course of the next few weeks Yahoo would roll out a new feature to their email that blocks any unauthenticated email from eBay and PayPal.
In a blog post Nikki Dugan says:

Relevance: don't underestimate it, measure it.

Ken Magill has an article today about a new service from e-Dialog called the Relevancy Trajectory. This product

Think about that subject line

Ken Magill talks about a study done by People magazine on the importance of subject lines and from lines in getting recipients to open and act on an email.
MailChimp has specific open information about mail sent through their application. They describe the collection of the information used in this blog post.
Recipients really do make open / not-open decisions based just on the visible subject line. MailChimp’s data shows that “boring” subject lines often perform better than pushier more sales like subject lines. One possible explanation is that recipients are used to ignoring spam subject lines, and the more informative a subject line, the more likely it is to be mail they actually open.

More on Truthout

Ken Magill comments on the reaction of truthout.org to being blocked by AOL and Hotmail.
I do agree with Al, if both AOL and Hotmail are blocking your email, then you’re doing something wrong.

Goodmail

Goodmail made a splash on the email marketing and ISP industries a few years ago by announcing their CertifiedEmail program. They guaranteed that using their certification would result in email going directly to the inbox, and all images in the email would be displayed by default. Senders using Goodmail would pay money, per message, and Goodmail would split that money with the receiving ISP.
This sounds very much like a situation where everyone wins. The senders get their mail to the inbox with images turned on. The receiving ISPs get a little money to deliver email and offloads some of their sender screening onto a third party. Individual recipients know that this email is certified and that it’s safe to click on links in the email.
In the time since CertifiedEmail has been announced, however, there seems to be very little adoption. Sure, receivers do seem to be signing up, a little. AOL and Yahoo have been using CertifiedEmail for a while. In summer 2007, a number of cable providers announced they would be using CertifiedEmail as well.
Senders, on the other hand, don’t seem to be adopting this as fast as Goodmail might like. The Federal Government recently announced they would be sending email signed by Goodmail and some large online companies, Overstock.com among them, are also sending with certified email. In order to get more companies to sign up for CertifiedEmail, Goodmail announced in August 2007 that they had partnered with CheetahMail, Episilon and Axciom Digital to provide free CertifiedEmail to qualifying customers of those ESPs.
Why might companies not be adopting CertifiedEmail? I have a couple of thoughts.

Spam Documentary on TV

A few months back John Levine participated in a Canadian TV Show called Spam, The documentary. This will be shown on Court TV on Sept 18th at 11pm or the 19th at 3am.
John says

Real Spam?

Both Al and Mickey have written astute comments on Kevin Sirtz’s article about how permission is not important in web[sic] marketing.
It is pretty clear to me that Mr. Sirtz does not really understand email, and not just because he conflates email with the web. Anyone who has been involved in the email marketing space knows that permission is the lynchpin of good deliverability and high ROI.
This is not to say that Mr. Sirtz is not having the experience he states. With very small lists you can get away with personal relationships substituting for permission. Senders of any size, though, do not have the relationship with their recipients and need to actually send email only to those recipients who have requested to receive email from the sender.

Consent and laws

Derek Harding wrote an article at ClickZ talking about consent and how the email marketing industry hasn’t yet learned that consent is important.