February 2015 – The month in email

This was a short and busy month at WttW!

We attended another great M3AAWG conference, and had our usual share of interesting discussions, networking, and cocktails. I recapped our adventures here, and shared a photo of the people who keep your email safe while wearing kilts as well. We also commended Jayne Hitchcock on winning the Mary Litynski award for her work fighting abuse and cyberstalking.

In other industry news, we noted that Salesforce is launching DKIM support, which means senders will be able to use DMARC as well. With the volume of email that is sent through the Salesforce platform every day, this is great news for senders who have additional authentication requirements. Speaking of authentication, I wrote up a summary of our current recommendations.

We continue to be interested in the ongoing discussions in our industry about measuring email engagement. One of the most-visible email metrics marketers use is the open, and we talked about all the different ways that might be measured. We also noted Chad White’s great post on the subject. We’ll have more on this over the next few weeks, both about how engagement is measured and why it matters.

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Engaging emails for better delivery

MessageSystems is sponsoring a webinar hosted by Direct Marketing discussing engagement as part of delivery.

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July 2014: The month in email

We continue to be busy with really interesting client work. Look for some new posts and white papers to come out of this research over the next few months, but for now blogging has been a bit light while we’re working hard. In parallel with our busy times, we have also been pondering the ways in which the email world illustrates the classic bon mot  “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, and we’ve been revisiting some posts from a few years ago to examine this.
We started July with a nod to a good subscription experience just as CASL, the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation went into effect on Canada Day. While companies have another 17 months to put these provisions into practice, it’s a good reminder that periodic re-engagement with customers can be very effective in helping you maintain high-quality subscriber lists. We talked a bit more about CASL here and what protections the law intends.
In stark contrast, we posted about an organization that is doing a less-than-stellar job making sure they’re only sending wanted email. The Direct Marketing Association is a terrific resource and member organization for marketers across industries and channels, but their email marketing practices don’t always live up to their mission of “Advancing and Protecting Responsible Data-Driven Marketing”, and we explored some ways in which they might improve this.
Those of you who have been reading this blog for any time at all know that we tend to talk about wanted mail and unwanted mail rather than the more general category of spam. Marketers tend to think their mail can’t possibly be spam if it’s not offering Viagra or phishing for credit card information, but that’s not really the point — if a customer doesn’t want to read your email about new mountain bikes, even if they bought a mountain bike from you three years ago, that’s unwanted email. Here’s a post we revisited about why customers might not want your mail, and a new post about engagement.
One risk of sending unwanted email, of course, is that customers complain, and that will affect your delivery going forward. We revisited a post about feedback loops, and also talked a bit about addressing delivery problems as they come up rather than waiting for them to resolve on their own (mostly, they won’t!)
I also proposed a bit of a thought experiment around monetizing the complaint stream, and followed up with a second post. There are some good points in the comments of those posts, but mostly I think it’s an interesting solution to addressing risk and abuse at ESPs.
Finally, Steve wrote a short post about our new mail servers and how quickly spammers descended as we set those up. It’s a constant battle!

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May 2014: The month in email

It’s been a busy and exciting month for us here.
Laura finished a multi-year project with M3AAWG, the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (look for the results to be published later this year) and continued working with clients on interesting delivery challenges and program opportunities. Steve focused on development on the next version release of Abacus, our flagship abuse desk tool, which will also be available later this year.
And as always, we had things to say about email.
The World of Spam and Email Best Practices
We started the month with a bit of a meta-discussion on senders’ fears of being labeled spammers, and reiterated what we always say: sending mail that some people don’t want doesn’t make you evil, but it is an opportunity to revisit your email programs and see if there are opportunities to better align your goals with the needs of people on your email lists. We outlined how we’ve seen people come around to this position after hitting spamtraps. That said, sometimes it is just evil. And it’s still much the same evil it’s been for over a decade.
We also wrote a post about reputation, which is something we get asked about quite frequently. We have more resources on the topic over at the WiseWords section of our site.
Gmail, Gmail, Gmail
Our friends over at Litmus estimate Gmail market share at 12%, which seems pretty consistent with the percentage of blog posts we devote to the topic, yes? We had a discussion of Campaign Monitor’s great Gmail interview, and offered some thoughts on why we continue to encourage clients to focus on engagement and relevance in developing their email programs. We also wrote a post about how Gmail uses filters, which is important for senders to understand as they create campaigns.
SMTP and TLS
Steve wrote extensively this month about the technical aspects of delivery and message security. This “cheat sheet” on SMTP rejections is extremely useful for troubleshooting – bookmark it for the next time you’re scratching your head trying to figure out what went wrong.
He also wrote a detailed explanation of how TLS encryption works with SMTP to protect email in transit, and followed that with additional information on message security throughout the life of the message. This is a great set of posts to explore if you’re thinking about security and want to understand potential vulnerabilities.
DKIM
Steve also wrote a series of posts about working with DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), the specification for signing messages to identify and claim responsibility for messages. He started with a detailed explanation of DKIM Replay Attacks, which happens when valid email is forwarded or otherwise compromised by spammers, phishers or attackers. Though the DKIM signature persists (by design) through a forward, the DKIM specification restricts an attacker’s ability to modify the message itself. Steve’s post describes how senders can optimize their systems to further restrict these attacks. Another way that attackers attempt to get around DKIM restrictions is by injecting additional headers into the message, which can hijack a legitimately signed message. If you’re concerned about these sort of attacks (and we believe you should be), it’s worth learning more about DKIM Key Rotation to help manage this. (Also of note: we have some free DKIM management tools available in the WiseTools section of our site.)
As always, we’re eager to hear from you if there are topics you’d like us to cover in June.

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