Creating effective links

CampaignMonitor blogged today about an email they sent out that triggered the Thunderbird “this might be a scam” filter.

After a bit of tweaking, we discovered that Thunderbird systematically throws up this alert when it sees a URLs in your HTML email copy. In this case, we had made the mistake of adding the following line:
If you would like to support the National Wildlife Federation in protecting wildlife and their habitats, kindly donate at http://killspill.org/.

This isn’t just a Thunderbird filter, many of the spamfilters out there including those at the various webmail providers and those built into desktop email clients look at the same thing.
In some cases, they throw up a warning when the text in the <a href=””> tag is different from the visible text. For example:
<a href=”http://clickthroughlink.esp.domain.com”> http://killspill.org</a>
will trigger a warning in many email clients while
<a href=”http://killspill.org/”>http://killspill.org/</a>
won’t generate a warning.  But in some clients, including apparently Thunderbird, the link <a href=”http://killspill.org/”> http://killspill.org/</a> will cause a scam warning.
These warnings themselves are a good thing. Overall, there are a lot of phishers and scammers use mis-matching links to attempt to deceive recipients into clicking on http://spammersite.com/ because they think they’re visiting http://amazon.com/.

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HTML in email

Steve and I were talking this afternoon about HTML in email. He wanted to know what headers I looked for in the HTML portion of an email. A good question, as I’ve seen everything from a full doctype declaration through to just <body> tags.. All of them seem to render OK in various mail clients so I don’t spend too much time worrying about the specific HTML header elements. I do look for invalid tags and comments, but I check those whether they are in the header or the body.
Those of you that design HTML emails, what are your experiences with headers? Are there specific HTML headers that you always include? Do you skip the header portion of the HTML document and just use body tags? How do you test? What do you think is important?

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Who's sharing data

Al has a post asking what people would do if their information was shared after opting out of any sharing.
It’s a tough call and one I think about as I see mail coming to my mailbox to such addresses as laura-sony and laura-quicken and laura-datran. All of these were addresses given to specific companies and where I attempted to opt-out of them sharing my data with other companies. Somewhere along the line, though, the addresses leaked and got into the hands of spammers.
Those addresses are overwhelmed with spams and scams. The frustrating part is there is no way to fix it. Once the addresses are leaked, they’re leaked. They will be receiving spam throughout eternity, even if the companies involved stop selling data or fix their data handling problem.
I don’t know what to do, honestly. If I think it was a one time thing, such as the addresses that started getting spam after the iContact data leak, then I’ll change my address at the vendor and retire the address the spammers have. But with other vendors, I don’t know what happened and I suspect the vendor doesn’t either, and so I can either deal with the spam or hope that I don’t lose real mail from that vendor.
There’s no easy answer. Any time you hand over an email address, or any other form of personal data, you’re trusting in the company, all of their employees and all of their vendors and partners to be honest and competent. This is often not the case.
What do you do?

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You might be a spammer if….

You feel the need to add

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS NOT A SPAM OR AUTOMATED EMAIL, IT’S ONLY A  REQUEST FOR A LINK EXCHANGE. YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS HAS NOT BEEN ADDED TO ANY LISTS, AND YOU WILL NOT BE CONTACTED AGAIN.IF YOU’D LIKE TO MAKE  SURE WE DON’T CONTACT YOU AGAIN, PLEASE FILL IN THE FOLLOWING FORM: <link>
PLEASE ACCEPT OUR APOLOGIES FOR CONTACTING YOU.

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