May 2015: The Month in Email

Greetings from Dublin, where we’re gearing up for M3AAWG adventures.
In the blog this month, we did a post on purchased lists that got a lot of attention. If you’ve been reading the blog for any length of time, you know how I feel about purchased lists — they perform poorly and cause delivery problems, and we always advise clients to steer clear. With your help, we’ve now compiled a list of the ESPs that have a clearly stated policy that they will not tolerate purchased lists. This should be valuable ammunition both for ESPs and for email program managers when they asked to use purchased lists. Let us know if we’re missing any ESPs by commenting directly on that post. We also shared an example of what we saw when we worked with a client using a list that had been collected by a third party.
In other best practices around addresses, we discussed all the problems that arise when people use what they think are fake addresses to fill out web forms, and gave a nod to a marketer trying an alternate contact method to let customers know their email is bouncing.
We also shared some of the things we advise our clients to do when they are setting up a mailing or optimizing an existing program. You might consider trying them before your own next send. In the “what not to do” category, we highlighted four things that spammers do that set them apart from legitimate senders.
In industry news, we talked about mergers, acquisitions and the resulting business changes: Verizon is buying AOL, Aurea is buying Lyris, Microsoft will converge Office365/EOP and Outlook.com/Hotmail, and Sprint will no longer support clear.net and clearwire.net addresses.
Josh posted about Yahoo’s updated deliverability FAQ, which is interesting reading if you’re keeping up on deliverability and ESP best practices. He also wrote about a new development in the land of DMARC: BestGuessPass. Josh also wrote a really useful post about the differences between the Mail From and the Display From addresses, which is a handy reference if you ever need to explain it to someone.
And finally, I contributed a few “meta” posts this month that you might enjoy:

 

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Dealing with compromised user accounts

M3AAWG is on a roll lately with published documents. They recently released the Compromised User ID Best Practices (pdf link).

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This month in email: February 2014

After a few months of hiatus, I’m resurrecting the this month in email feature. So what did we talk about in February?
Industry News
There was quite a bit of industry news. M3AAWG was in mid-February and there were actually a few sessions we were allowed to blog about. Gmail announced their new pilot FBL program. Ladar Levinson gave the keynote talking about the Lavabit shutdown and his new darkmail program. Brian Krebs won the Mary Litynski award for his work in investigating online security issues. The 4 major mailbox providers talked about their spam filters and spam filtering philosophy.
February was also the month where different companies evaluated their success or failure of products. LinkedIn announced the shutdown of their Intro product and Facebook announced the shutdown of their Facebook.com email service.
Security Issues
Cloudmark published their 2013 report on the Global Spam Threat and we discovered that the massive Target breach started through phishing. I also noticed a serious uptick in the amount of phishing mails in my own mailbox. There is  new round of denial of service attacks using NTP amplification. We provided information on how to secure your NTP servers.
Address Collection
The Hip Hop group De La Soul released their entire catalog for free, online, using a confirmed opt-in email process. On the flip side, the M3AAWG hotel required anyone logging into the wifi network to give an email address and agree to receive marketing mail. We also discovered that some political mailing lists were being used in ways the politicians and recipients didn’t expect.
Email Practices
I talked about how to go about contacting an ISP that doesn’t have a postmaster page or a published method of contact. Much of that information is actually relevant for contacting ISPs that do have a contact method, too. Finally, I talked about how ISPs measure engagement and how that’s significantly different from how ESPs think it is.
 

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Friday fun stuff

Between the rampaging llamas and a photo optical illusion the internet has been a silly, silly place the last 24 hours.
I have a little present for folks. I hinted there may be pictures from Kilt Day at M3AAWG in an earlier post.
There are, and all of the subjects have granted permission for me to share the photos here. Follow me below the cut.

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