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.

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I’ve talked about spamtraps in the past but they keep coming up in so many different discussions I have with people about delivery that I feel the need to write another blog post about them.
Spamtraps are …
… addresses that did not or could not sign up to receive mail from a sender.
… often mistakenly entered into signup forms (typos or people who don’t know their email addresses).
… often found on older lists.
… sometimes scraped off websites and sold by list brokers.
… sometimes caused by terrible bounce management.
… only a symptom …

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January 2015 – The Month in Email

It’s February already! January went fast, right? At WttW, we are gearing up for MAAWG SF later this month — will we see you there?
We started the year with a set of predictions about email. Mostly we think email will continue to be great at some things and not-so-great at other things, and we’ll keep fighting the good fight to make it better.
As always, I’m interested in filters and how spammers continue to work around them to reach the inbox. I also wrote about how the language of an email impacts delivery, and wrote an expanded response to a comment suggesting email filters should be illegal. You can guess where I stand on that (and if you can’t, perhaps you might read more about how email is an inherently malicious traffic stream…)
I also took a moment to point out a trend I’m really enjoying, which is the rise of content marketing (a.k.a. giving customers useful and interesting information they can’t find elsewhere). As I said in the post, I’ll be curious to see how ROI plays out with this strategy.
We also talked about some of the less exciting content we see in email, notably the infamous Murkowski Statement, by which a spammer declares “Nope! Nothing to see over here!”
Steve also pointed out some content shenanigans in the form of hidden preview text, with some additional clarification from the original marketer in the comments.
In industry news, the big story was that Microsoft has partially implemented DMARC for Office365, and was the first to make a public statement about the specific ways they’ve chosen to implement. In my post, I did a walkthrough of a message to illustrate a bit about how this works, which might be useful if you’re trying to wrap your head around DMARC implementations.
We also talked about consolidation in the ESP space, and got a number of comments from readers about who they think might be next. Shortly thereafter, Listcast was acquired by MailerMailer.
Josh noted a few major shutdowns: Yahoo China email services and the AHBL list. The latter explores the challenges inherent in decommissioning a blacklist, and there’s a good discussion in the comments, so you might check it out if you missed that earlier this month.
Josh also pointed to the Salesforce State of Marketing report, which is always a useful set of metrics about how marketers are using email and other channels. It’s definitely worth a read.

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