Uploading your address book to social media

I am one of the moderators of a discussion list working on a document about getting off blocklists. If anyone not on the list attempts to post to the list I get a moderation request. One came through while I was gone.
linkedinspam Now, I don’t really think Jim Mills wants to be friends with a mailing list. I think he probably gave LinkedIn his email password and LinkedIn went through and scraped addresses out of his address book and sent invitations to all those addresses.
I don’t have any problem with connecting to people on social media. I do even understand that some people have no problem giving their passwords over to let social media sites plunder their address books and find connections. What I do have a problem with is social media sites that don’t do any pruning or editing of the scraped addresses before sending invitations.
In this case, the email address, like many mailing lists, has in the email address “mailman.” While it’s probably impossible to weed out every mailing list, support address and commercial sender, it doesn’t seem like it would be too difficult to run some minor word matching and filtering. It’s not even like those addresses have to be removed from invites. Instead they could be presented to the user for confirmation that these are real people and addresses.
Yes, it’s friction in the transaction and it costs money to do and do well. But those costs and friction are currently offloaded onto uninvolved third parties.

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Data Cleansing

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

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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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The importance of data hygiene

Over the weekend, one of the major ISPs purged a lot of abandoned accounts from their system. This has resulted in a massive increase in 550 user unknown bounces at that ISP. This ISP is one of those that uses bounces to feed into their reputation system and the purge may cause otherwise good senders to be blocked temporarily.
Talking to clients and other industry folks, it looks like the addresses that have newly bounced off had zero activity for at least 6 months. Nothing. Nada. No clicks. No opens. No interaction.
This is why data hygiene is so critical. Just because the emails are being accepted at the ISP, and even showing inbox placement at the mailbox monitoring companies does not mean that there is actually someone reading your email. Failure to look at overall data means that when an ISP bulk deletes abandoned accounts then bounces will increase. While I don’t expect this to have any real, long term effect on sender reputation I do expect that some senders with a lot of cruft on their list will see some short term delivery problems.
Companies that run re-engagement campaigns saw a whole lot less bouncing and even less blocking as a result of the purge. They were removing addresses that were non-responsive all along and thus didn’t have major deadwood on their list.
Ongoing data hygiene shows you what your list really is, not your list plus abandoned accounts. The addresses that the ISP purged? They were not valuable anyway. No one was reading that mail for at least 6 months.
If you did see a spike in bounces this weekend at a major ISP, you should really look at engagement. If some percentage of recipients at one ISP are actually non-existent, then it’s likely that about that same number are non-existent at other major ISPs as well. What are you going to do to identify and remove those dead addresses from your lists?

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