June 2016: The Month in Email

We’re officially halfway through 2016, and looking forward to a slightly less hectic month around here. I hope you’re enjoying your summer (or winter, for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere).
 

Trinity College Dublin, 2015 © Laura Atkins
Trinity College Dublin, 2015 © Laura Atkins
 
Our first June blog post marked the fifteen year anniversary of the very first anti-spam conference, SpamCon. As I noted, many of the people at that conference are still working in the email space — and many of the same spammers are still working in email too. We were also delighted to see that one of the worst of them, Sanford “Spamford” Wallace, was finally sentenced to jail time for his exploits.
We’ve also been longtime members of the M3AAWG community, and as the 37th meeting convened in Philadelphia this month, I wrote about some of what makes that group work so well.
As we inch closer and closer to the November election, we see more and more email from candidates, PACs, and other interest groups. I wrote about some of the challenges these senders face with spam filtering, both in terms of content and bad subscriber data.
Filtering, as I often reiterate, is increasingly a function of permission. You need to be invited into the inbox, and if you’re not, your mail will be filtered. Permission isn’t transferable. It can’t be shared from one list to another. If you’ve purchased addresses, you don’t have permission to mail those recipients, and your mail doesn’t belong in the inbox. People often call us to see how they might work around this lack of permission, and we’re constantly explaining why we can’t help them with that. Not convinced? Here’s another post about who owns the inbox, with some detail from my panel at Connections 16 and a followup post from Litmus.
Another deliverability question that came up at a recent panel discussion was about role accounts, so I wrote up some thoughts on how these are used and the specific challenges of delivering to these accounts.
In technical topics, I wrote a long guide to bounce handling, and we had some good discussion in the comments, which I always like (hint, hint!). Steve wrote about our experience (and others’) with TLS certificates, specifically with Comodo, who have failed their customers in numerous less-than-ethical ways. Steve also wrote a post about domain transparency, and how important it is for recipients to be able to understand where their email is coming from.
For my Ask Laura column, I answered a question about using video content in email. There are currently no standards for using rich media in email, and as such, this content can create delivery challenges. In a related topic, I wrote about the way that content complexity affects delivery, and some tools marketers can use to help with this.

About the Hillary Clinton email server thing…
Spam, campaign statistics and red flag URLs

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Things to read: March 9, 2016

It’s sometimes hard for me to keep up with what other people are saying and discussing about email marketing. I’ve been trying to be more active on LinkedIn, but there are just so many good marketing and delivery blogs out there I can’t keep up with all of them.
talkingforblog
Here are a couple interesting things I’ve read in the last week.
Five Steps to Stay Out of the Spam Folder. Conceptually easy, sometimes hard to pull off in practice, these recommendations mirror many things I say here and tell my clients about delivery. The audience is in charge and your recipients are the best ally you can have when it comes to getting into the inbox.
Which states are the biggest sources of spam?. California and New York top the list, but the next two states are a little surprising. Over on Spamresource, Al points out the two next states have some unique laws that may affect the data. I just remember back in the day there were a lot of spammers in Michigan, I’m surprised there’s still a significant volume from there.
CASL didn’t destroy Canadian email. Despite concerns that CASL would destroy the Canadian email marketing industry, the industry is going strong and expanding. In fact, spending on email marketing in Canada was up more than 14% in 2015 and is on track to be up another 10% this year. Additionally, according to eMarketer lists are performing better because they’re cleaner.
A brief history of email. Part of the Guardian’s tribute to Ray Tomlinson, the person who sent the first email. Ray’s work literally changed lives. I know my life would be significantly different if there wasn’t email. Can you imagine trying to be a deliverability consultant without email? 🙂

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August 2015: The month in review

It’s been a busy blogging month and we’ve all written about challenges and best practices. I found myself advocating that any company that does email marketing really must have a well-defined delivery strategy. Email is such vital part of how most companies communicate with customers and potential customers, and the delivery landscape continues to increase in complexity (see my post on pattern matching for a more abstract look at how people tend to think about filters and getting to the inbox). Successful email marketers are proactive about delivery strategy and are able to respond quickly as issues arise. Stay tuned for more from us on this topic.
I also wrote up some deliverability advice for the DNC, which I think is valuable for anyone looking at how to maintain engagement with a list over time.  It’s also worth thinking about in the context of how to re-engage a list that may have been stagnant for a while. A comment on that post inspired a followup discussion about how delivery decisions get made, and whether an individual person in the process could impact something like an election through these delivery decisions. What do you think?
As we frequently point out, “best practices” in delivery evolve over time, and all too often, companies set up mail programs and never go back to check that things continue to run properly. We talked about how to check your tech, as well as what to monitor during and after a send. Josh wrote about utilizing all of your data across multiple mail streams, which is critical for understanding how you’re engaging with your recipients, as well as the importance of continuous testing to see what content and presentation strategies work best for those recipients.
Speaking of recipients, we wrote a bit about online identity and the implications of unverified email addresses in regards to the Ashley Madison hack and cautioned about false data and what might result from the release of that data.
Steve’s in-depth technical series for August was a two-part look at TXT records — what they are and how to use them — and he explains that the ways people use these, properly and improperly, can have a real impact on your sends.
In spam news, the self-proclaimed Spam King Sanford Wallace is still spamming, despite numerous judgments against him and his most recent guilty plea this month. For anyone else still confused about spam, the FTC answered some questions on the topic. It’s a good intro or refresher to share with colleagues. We also wrote about the impact of botnets on the inbox (TL;DR version: not much. The bulk of the problem for end users continues to be people making poor marketing decisions.) In other fraud news, we wrote about a significant spearphishing case and how DMARC may or may not help companies protect themselves.

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Spam is not a moral judgement

Mention an email is spam to some senders and watch them dance around trying to explain all the ways they aren’t spammers. At some point, calling an email spam seems to have gone from a statement of fact into some sort of moral judgement on the sender. But calling an email spam is not a moral judgement. It’s just a statement of what a particular recipient thinks of an email.
There are lots of reasons mail can be blocked and not all those reasons are spam related. Sometimes it’s a policy based rejection. Mailbox providers publishing a DMARC record with a reject policy caused a lot of mail to bounce, but none of that was because that user (or that mailing list) was sending spam. Most cable companies prohibit customers from running mail servers on their cable connection and mail from those companies is widely rejected, but that doesn’t mean the mail is spam.
Sometimes a block is because some of the mail is being sent to people who didn’t ask for it or are complaining about it. This doesn’t make the sender a bad person. It doesn’t make the sending company bad. It just means that there is some issue with a part of the marketing program that need to be addressed.
The biggest problem I see is some senders get so invested in convincing receivers, delivery experts and filtering companies that they’re not spammers, that they miss actually fixing the problem. They are so worried that someone might think they’re spammers, they don’t actually listen to what’s being said by the blocking organization, or by their ISP or by their ESP.
Calling email spam isn’t a moral judgement. But, if too many people call a particular email spam, it’s going to be challenging to get that mail to the inbox. Instead of arguing with those people, and the filters that listen to them, a better use of time and energy is fixing the reasons people aren’t liking your email.

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