August 2015: The month in review

It’s been a busy blogging month and we’ve all written about challenges and best practices. I found myself advocating that any company that does email marketing really must have a well-defined delivery strategy. Email is such vital part of how most companies communicate with customers and potential customers, and the delivery landscape continues to increase in complexity (see my post on pattern matching for a more abstract look at how people tend to think about filters and getting to the inbox). Successful email marketers are proactive about delivery strategy and are able to respond quickly as issues arise. Stay tuned for more from us on this topic.
I also wrote up some deliverability advice for the DNC, which I think is valuable for anyone looking at how to maintain engagement with a list over time.  It’s also worth thinking about in the context of how to re-engage a list that may have been stagnant for a while. A comment on that post inspired a followup discussion about how delivery decisions get made, and whether an individual person in the process could impact something like an election through these delivery decisions. What do you think?
As we frequently point out, “best practices” in delivery evolve over time, and all too often, companies set up mail programs and never go back to check that things continue to run properly. We talked about how to check your tech, as well as what to monitor during and after a send. Josh wrote about utilizing all of your data across multiple mail streams, which is critical for understanding how you’re engaging with your recipients, as well as the importance of continuous testing to see what content and presentation strategies work best for those recipients.
Speaking of recipients, we wrote a bit about online identity and the implications of unverified email addresses in regards to the Ashley Madison hack and cautioned about false data and what might result from the release of that data.
Steve’s in-depth technical series for August was a two-part look at TXT records — what they are and how to use them — and he explains that the ways people use these, properly and improperly, can have a real impact on your sends.
In spam news, the self-proclaimed Spam King Sanford Wallace is still spamming, despite numerous judgments against him and his most recent guilty plea this month. For anyone else still confused about spam, the FTC answered some questions on the topic. It’s a good intro or refresher to share with colleagues. We also wrote about the impact of botnets on the inbox (TL;DR version: not much. The bulk of the problem for end users continues to be people making poor marketing decisions.) In other fraud news, we wrote about a significant spearphishing case and how DMARC may or may not help companies protect themselves.

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Data Cleansing part 2

In an effort to get a blog post out yesterday before yet another doctor’s appointment I did not do nearly enough research on the company I mentioned selling list cleansing data. As Al correctly pointed out in the comments they are currently listed on the SBL. And when I actually did the research I should have done it was clear this company has a long term history of sending unsolicited email.
Poor research and a quickly written blog post led to me endorsing a company that I absolutely shouldn’t have. And I do apologize for that.
With all that being said, Justin had a great question in the comments of yesterday’s post about data cleansing.

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Still Spamming…

StillSpammingThis morning I woke up to news that Sanford Wallace pled guilty to spamming. Again.
Sanford was one of the very early spammers (savetrees.com). He moved to email from junk faxing when Congress made junk faxing illegal in 2005. He sued AOL when AOL blocked his mail. He lost and the courts maintained that blocking spam was not a violation of the sender’s rights. Sanford then moved on to using open relays to avoid blocks. He was eventually disconnected from his backbone provider (AGIS) for abuse. Sanford sued AGIS for breach of contract and was reconnected for a brief period of time.
After his disconnection from AGIS, Sanford and a few of the other folks proposed a backbone provider that allowed bulk email marketing. That never really went anywhere.
Reading these old articles is a major blast in the past. The legal case between AGIS and Cyberpromotions was the event that led to my involvement in email marketing and spam. I even spent a Saturday afternoon in the late 90s with about a dozen people on a con call with Sanford and Walt talking about his backbone idea. My position was pretty simple: it wasn’t going to work, but as long as there was consent it was his network and he could do what he wanted.
I kinda lost track, just because he moved onto other ways of advertising and I got deeper and deeper into deliverability consulting. He did show up on my radar a few years ago when Facebook sued him for breaking into user accounts and using those accounts to spam. He lost a $711 million dollar judgement to Facebook, but given he didn’t have the resources the judge in that case recommended criminal charges.
Criminal charges were filed a few years later. Yesterday, Sanford pled guilty to fraud and criminal contempt as well as violating a court order to stay off Facebook’s network.
He now faces $250,000 in fines and up to 16 years in jail. Given his history, I expect he’ll figure out some way to still send spam even if he’s locked up.
Sanford is one of the reasons so many folks have such a low opinion of anyone who describes their business as “legitimate email marketing.” Sanford used the same phrase back in the late 90s. Of course no one, with the possible exception of him, actually believed that. But when someone like that adopts the moniker “legitimate email marketer” it’s hard to take them seriously when someone like Sanford has been using that since the late 90s.
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More on Newsmax and spam to political lists

Things are getting stranger and stranger with Newsmax and the politicians they’re managing lists for.  Earlier this week, recipients on Scott Brown’s list received emails with the subject line “5 Signs You’ll Get Alzheimer’s Disease.” The advertisement was for products and information from Dr. Blaylock, a contributor to Newsmax Health. Scott Brown told the political reporter at WMUR in New Hampshire that he did not authorize this email was cutting ties with Newsmax
Newsmax contacted me after I posted about unexpected email to the Herman Cain mailing list. They wanted to make it clear to me that their mailings were all double opt-in and that they adhered to all best practices. They also said that select advertisers were allowed to put ads in the body of messages from the politician to their supporters.
It seems, though, that may not be the whole truth. After I received the message from Newsmax, I signed up on caintv.com to see if they really were using double opt-in. While it is very possible that Mr. Cain was using double opt-in during the campaign, he isn’t any longer. I started receiving emails immediately, with neither a welcome message or a confirmation message.
In the case of Scott Brown’s list, the advertisement wasn’t from an outside advertiser, the advertisement was for a Newsmax columnist. And the ad wasn’t in the body of a message to supporters, it was the message to supporters. Mr. Brown has this to say about his likeness and mailing list being used by Newsmax.

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