Some email related news

A couple links to relevant things that are happening in email.
M3AAWG released the Help! I’m on a Blocklist! (PDF link) doc this week. This is the result of 4 years worth of work by a whole lot of people at M3AAWG. I was a part of the working group (“doc champion” in M3AAWG parlance) and want to thank everyone who was involved and contributed to the process. I am very excited this was approved and published so people can take advantage of the collective wisdom of M3AAWG participants.
In other announcements, Gmail announced today on their Google+ page that that they were putting a new “unsubscribe” link next to the sender name when mail is delivered to the Promotions, Social or Forums tab. This appears to be the official announcement of the functionality they announced at the SF M3AAWG last February. It likely means that all users are currently getting the “unsubscribe” link. What Gmail doesn’t mention in that blog post is that this functionality uses the “List-Unsubscribe” header, not the link in the email, but I don’t think anyone except bulk mailers really care about how it’s being done, just that it is.
Also today Gmail announced they were going to recognize usernames with non-Latin or accented characters in the name. Eventually, they claim, they’ll also allow people to get Gmail addresses with accented characters.

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Best practices: A Gmail Perspective

At M3AAWG 30 in San Francisco, Gmail representatives presented a session about best practices and what they wanted to see from senders.
I came out of the session with a few takeaways.

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M3AAWG conference next week

Next week is M3AAWG 30 in San Francisco. We’ll be there and are very excited to see the familiar faces and meet new people.
I recently had someone ask me what would I recommend to someone going to their first M3AAWG conference. My recommendation to anyone in the sender or marketer space is to go to some of the talks that are not about email delivery. Go to the sessions that talk about malware or SMS or anything other than just email delivery. For anyone in the ISP space go to a session focused on mobile or email sending. Use this time to learn about something totally different than what you do every day.
Another question I get frequently from senders is if the people from the ISPs are open to sitting down and talking with senders about the senders’ email problems. Generally, the answer is no. Most of the time, the ISP has no knowledge of who you are and what mail you’re sending, so all they can say is “send me an email with the IPs and I’ll take a look at it.” That’s it.
We’ll be in the city starting Monday afternoon, and I always enjoy meeting readers. Stop by and introduce yourself.

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Where did you get my address?

Both Steve and I are trying to get answers from Amazon, Target and Epsilon about how Target acquired our Amazon specific email addresses. Target phone reps told us the mail we got was a phish, Epsilon is refusing to acknowledge Target is a customer and Amazon has promised us “they’re looking into it.”
Meanwhile, an address of mine was transferred from one customer of an ESP to another customer of the same ESP. At first I was told I must have signed up for the mail; as proof I was provided with the data I supposedly signed up. When I explained no that wasn’t true, the abuse desk told me they had discovered there was a mistake and that “These two clients use the same 3rd party ESP and they had mixed the files.” I’m not actually sure who “they” refers to, but as long as they’ve untangled the files I am not going to argue. The sad part is that it took an escalation to Return Path (the IP sending the mail is certified) to get anyone to actually respond to my report of an address given to Company A being mailed by Company B.
On the flip side, mail showed up today that actually had a link for “how was I added?”
Atari_Optout
When you click on the link it shows exactly where the address came from and when it was added to the list.
How_was_I_added_to_this_list_
It would be great if more companies provided this information to their recipients. I think it would probably decrease spam reports and make consumers feel more comfortable about how companies are collecting and using information.

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