Recent email marketing news

Apparently mentioning “affiliate” in a blog post brings out the blog spammers. I’ve had dozens of trackbacks on yesterday’s how to avoid affiliate spam. Oh, the irony.
A bucket of announcements came out over the last week.
The uber smart folks at Mailchimp have a new iPad app called Chimpadeedoo. This app lets merchants collect email addresses at the point of sale, on an iPad sitting next to the register. Given the troubles my clients have run into when trying to collect addresses in their brick and mortars, this is definitely a product whose time has come.
Venkat talks about a few anti-spam cases making their way through California courts and how the courts seem to be siding with the plaintiffs recently.
On the lawsuit front, John Levine posts about peacefire.org losing an anti-spam case due to the Gordon v. Virtumundo case.
ReturnPath and Liveclicker have partnered to bring video to email. I know marketers are all for video in email, but I can’t get excited about it. I read fast and videos always seem to take to long to watch. I don’t have a feel, though, for how much the average email recipient wants video in their mailbox.
Stephanie Miller from ReturnPath has a summary of a talk given by representatives from Hotmail and Yahoo at the Email Insider’s Summit sponsored by Mediapost. Both ISPs emphasized the need for senders to engage their recipients.

priority number one is to make sure that only messages that are welcome and valued by end user subscribers reach the inbox.

The secret to email marketing: send mail people want to receive.

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News from MAAWG

During MAAWG a number of companies in the email space announce new initiatives, mergers, products and the like. This MAAWG is no different.
Spammers adjust to security trends. This is not really news, spammers have been adjusting to new security measures since folks started blocking from: addresses back in ’95 and ’96. The tactics are different and developing, but for every security hole that is blocked, spammers will search for another hole to exploit. The unfortunate truth is that end user is the weak point, and spammers and scammers are very very good at social engineering.
Spam statistics stalemate. Spam is still accounting for approximately 90% of all email traffic.
Cloudmark acquires Bizanga. I talked to some of the Cloudmark folks and they seem very excited with their acquisition of the Bizanga MTA and email technology.
Bizanga Storage announced. Bizanga Store is a scalable storage system brought to you by some of the people who were instrumental in building the Bizanga MTA acquired by Cloudmark.
ReturnPath announced partnership with RPost. Yet more ongoing changes in the certification field.

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News and links 12/31/09

We’re iced in here in DC so I’ve been catching up with some industry news while camped in front of a heater and the TV.
Best of the ESPs by Forrester Research. Congrats to ET and Responsys for coming out on top. The results, as reported by MediaPost, match reasonably well with my overall impressions of the industry (so they must be right!)
Return Path is rolling out a new version of SenderScore. A welcome change for those of us who regularly refer to an IP’s sender score and find it doesn’t match other data.
CAUCE has done a series of posts looking back at significant events in spam over the last decade.
Al has a retrospective on various data breaches affecting email addresses over the last few years.
Happy New Year, everyone!

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Spam is in the eye of the beholder

But only the opinion of the recipient counts. So says a blog post on All Spammed Up.

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