Data Cleansing

According to Ken, Outward Media has productized a database of 300,000,000 email addresses that should never be mailed.

OMI’s Clean-Send Suppression Database can help to protect your email sender reputation and save you valuable marketing dollars.
In a nutshell, OMI Clean-Send is a database consisting of approximately 300 million negative email records (spam traps, foreign IP’s, hard bounces, and other negative email data). Due to the erosive nature of consumer email, we have joined with a consortium of email partners who share the OMI philosophy that data quality is far more important than data quantity.

It’s an interesting idea. I certainly have a lot of clients who have come to me looking for ways to clean old lists and data of unknown provenance. This might be worth looking at.

Why so many domains
Data Cleansing part 2

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More than just getting past the filters

I’ve been feeling a little philosophical lately. My thoughts are meandering a lot around the whys and the deeper issues surrounding stuff, including email. It means I’m a bit more distracted and less focused than usual. And more prone to pose questions than usual. This was part of the introspection that led me to write the motivating people post last week. I’m trying to figure out how to motivate volunteers in two different realms. And there’s always the question of how do I present a solution to clients in a way that motivates them to take my advice. Sure, I get paid either way, but I really like it when clients take my advice and see success.
There are other places this mental meandering is taking me.
I’m currently working on a project for a client. This particular client is struggling to get mail delivered to a very mobile business audience. In the target field, people change jobs regularly and email addresses can change multiple times a year. One of the things I’m working on for them is how to get email to the right people, that is the people who opted in, when their addresses change so frequently.
This is delivery consulting, but this project really brings home how much more there is to delivery than avoiding filters. Filters are the least of this client’s problem. The real problem is the mobility of their audience. As I was thinking about how to address this issue of mobility, I realized that my job as a delivery expert has gone well beyond telling people how to get their mail past filters.
My job is much more about helping people succeed at what it is that they’re trying to do with email. How can email work for you and for your target audience?
Looking at the broader picture means I’m less likely to focus on the minutia of “spam words” and subject lines and best time of day to send. Sure, there are always tweaks to make in an email. There are always things to test. There are always changes to try. But the effect of those changes is not near as great as actually sending mail that meets the needs of the audience.
Often clients come to me so overwhelmed in the details they forget the bigger picture. I help them find that picture again. My job is much more than getting through the filters, it’s about finding success for clients.

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Zombie email: Part 3

Last week, in Zombie email: part 1 and part 2 I talked a little about the history of email addresses and how changes in the ISP industry in the early to mid 2000’s brought about the rise of zombie email addresses. Today we’ll look at the effect zombie addresses have on email stats and why ISPs are starting to monitor zombie addresses.
A zombie address, despite the fervent belief of some email marketers, doesn’t come back to life. The person who initially registered that address has decided to stop using that email address.  The defining factor of a zombie address is that there isn’t now and won’t be anyone in the future reading email sent to that address. There is no human there to read or react to any email sent to that address.
A zombie address does not represent an actual recipient, they’re just remnants of a recipient that once was present.
Having a list containing any significant number of zombie addresses can throw off metrics enough to mislead a sender about the effectiveness of their email marketing program. Sometimes, the zombie addresses make the metrics look worse, sometimes they make metrics look better. In either case, the metrics don’t accurately represent the performance of a marketing program.
Zombie email addresses do bulk out a mailing list, making lists look bigger. They’re not real addresses, so they don’t reflect quality, but they do impress marketers that think bigger is always better. But, in reality, you may as well add thousands of addresses at non-existent domains for the real value these addresses bring to your list.
Zombie email addresses on a list depresses any metric that use “number of emails sent” or “number of emails accepted” as a denominator.  If 10% of a list is zombie addresses, then an open rate reported as 15% will actually be an open rate of 16.7%. The more zombie addresses on a list, the more the statistics will be depressed.
In addition to having lower open rates, lists with more zombie addresses also have a lower complaint rate. In fact, in the recent past spammers have padded their lists with zombie addresses as a way to artificially lower their complaint rates.
Spammers using addresses created just to bulk up the denominator and lower complaint rates have led ISPs to start monitoring the types of addresses on a particular list. I first heard about ISPs looking at recipient profiles at a meeting in 2006, so it is not, in any way, a new technique for ISPs. What is new is the number of zombie addresses on legitimate, well maintained lists, and the fact that they are present in high enough volume to affect reputation and delivery.
ISPs use zombie addresses to monitor the reputation of a sender because it is a more accurate way to measure what the recipients think about an email and that sender. Senders ignore zombie addresses because they make some stats look bigger (total list size) and better (lower complaint rates). Many senders also believe that addresses come back to life, despite all evidence to the contrary, and will not purge an address for any reason other than it bounces. They’d rather live with inaccurate and misleading metrics than removing non-performing addresses.
Tomorrow, in the final post of this series, we’ll examine how senders can identify potential zombie addresses and what steps they can take protect themselves from the negative reputation hit from zombie addresses. (Zombie Apocalypse)

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Zombie email: Part 2

In zombie email: part 1 I talked about how email addresses were tightly tied to internet access in the very early years of the internet. We didn’t have to worry about zombie email addresses because when an account was shut down, or ignored for a long time then mail would start bouncing and a sender could stop sending to that account.
There were two major changes to email accounts in the early 2000’s that led to the rise of zombie emails.
People started decoupling their internet access from their email addresses. Free addresses were easy to get and could be checked from everywhere. No longer did they have to dial in to get email, they could access it from outside the office and outside the home. Mobile devices, including the first generation of smart phones and laptops, helped drive people to use email addresses that they could access from any network. The easy access to free mail accounts and the permanence led people to adopt those addresses as their primary address.
When people changed addresses, for whatever reason, they didn’t have to stop paying. There was no way to tell the free ISPs to stop accepting mail for that address. Free mail providers would let addresses linger for months or years after the user had stopped logging in. Sometimes those addresses would fill up and start bouncing email, but they were not often turned off by the ISPs.
The lack of purging of abandoned addresses was the start of dead addresses accumulating on mailing lists. But there weren’t that many addresses in this state, and eventually they would fill up with mail. When they were full the ISP would stop accepting new mail for that account, and the address would bounce off a mailing list.
Everything changed with the entrance of Gmail onto the scene. When Gmail launched in 2004 they were providing a whole GB of storage for email accounts a totally unheard of storage capacity. Within a year they were providing multiple gigabytes of storage. Other freemail systems followed Gmail’s lead and now all free accounts have nearly unlimited storage. Plus, any mail in the spam folder was purged after a few weeks and bulk mail doesn’t count against the users’ storage quota. Now, an abandoned email account will almost never fill up thus senders can’t use over quota bounces to identify abandoned accounts.
Now we’re stuck in a situation where SMTP replies can’t be used to identify that there is no one home inside a particular email account. Senders can’t distinguish between a quiet subscriber and an abandoned address. ISPs, however, can and are using zombie addresses as a measure of a senders reputation.
On Monday we’ll talk about why and how zombie addresses can affect delivery. (Zombie emails: part 3)
Tuesday, we’ll talk about strategies to protect your list from being taken over by zombies. (Zombie Apocalypse)

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