M3AAWG in Philly This Week

Today marks the training day for M3AAWG 37 in Philly. With all the traveling and speaking I’ve been doing lately we’re not going to be there. So no tweeting from me about the conference.
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We’ve been attending various M3AAWG meetings since way early on – 2004? 2005? in San Diego. The organization has grown and matured and really come a long way since the early days. One of the challenges of M3AAWG is that it is a true working group. This isn’t like the various conferences I’ve been attending recently. I think there are two things that makes M3AAWG different from other conferences.
One of the most obvious things is the lack of a vendor floor. Sure, there are vendors and sponsors but vendors don’t bring in displays and have sales people stand around them to talk to folks. The conference does have demos and negotiations and meetings, but done differently than other events.
The other difference I’ve noticed is that M3AAWG is much more about participation. As the name says, this is a working group. Everyone is encouraged to get involved in things they’re interested in or that they think they can contribute to. Other conferences are a lot more about information being shared by speakers and panels. But during M3AAWG conferences, there are 2 mornings devoted to round tables.
The round tables are a true community effort, and probably deserve some discussion for people who’ve never been to the conference. Before the conference, members of the community submit ideas for things they think M3AAWG should discuss. These suggestions are reviewed by the board and leadership and ones that fall within M3AAWG’s purview are taken to the conference.
The first day of roundtables each topic is discussed in small groups. Volunteers facilitate a 20 – 30 minute discussion on the topic at hand with attendees. After time is called, attendees go to another topic and discuss that one. Part of what is discussed is not just the issue (say, how to get off a blacklist) but also what the final work product looks like. Is this a document for M3AAWG members? A panel at a future conference? A public document?
The second day is refinement of the roundtable topics and commitment from people to move the project forward. Champion is the person who is project managing this. Other roles depend on the work product. For presentation or panels, there is one set of roles. For documents there are roles as writers and editors and contributor.
M3AAWG has written and produced some useful resources and information over the years. Many of those resources are public, like best practice documents and metric reports. Other docs and reports are specifically for members.
The working group part of M3AAWG in one of its real strengths. Experts on all sides of the business of email get together to keep email useable and workable. Early on it there were a few barriers and some suspicion about various participant groups. But, as the industry as grown things have changed. Many folks have moved from ISPs to ESPs and back. There’s also a bigger place for companies that provide services to ESPs and ISPs, like us here at Word to the Wise. We’ve built bridges and technology and have been a positive force on the world.
 

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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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June 2015: the Month in Email

Happy July! We are back from another wonderful M3AAWG conference and enjoyed seeing many of you in Dublin. It’s always so great for us to connect with our friends, colleagues, and readers in person. I took a few notes on Michel van Eeten’s keynote on botnets, and congratulated our friend Rodney Joffe on winning the prestigious Mary Litynski Award.
In anti-spam news, June brought announcements of three ISP-initiated CAN-SPAM cases, as well as a significant fine leveled by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) against Porter Airlines. In other legal news, a UK case against Spamhaus has been settled, which continues the precedent we’ve observed that documenting a company’s practice of sending unsolicited email does not constitute libel.
In industry news, AOL started using Sender Score Certification, and Yahoo announced (and then implemented) a change to how they handle their Complaint Feedback Loop (CFL). Anyone have anything to report on how that’s working? We also noted that Google has discontinued the Google Apps for ISPs program, so we expect we might see some migration challenges along the way. I wrote a bit about some trends I’m seeing in how email programs are starting to use filtering technologies for email organization as well as fighting spam.
Steve, Josh and I all contributed some “best practices” posts this month on both technical issues and program management issues. Steve reminded us that what might seem like a universal celebration might not be a happy time for everyone, and marketers should consider more thoughtful strategies to respect that. I wrote a bit about privacy protection (and pointed to Al Iverson’s post on the topic), and Josh wrote about when senders should include a physical address, what PTR (or Reverse DNS) records are and how to use them, testing your opt-out process (do it regularly!), and advice on how to use images when many recipients view email with images blocked.

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2016 Mary Litynski Award

The Mary Litynski Award is presented by M3AAWG to people who have done extensive work outside the public eye over a significant period of time. At the Dublin conference the award was presented to Rodney Joffe. A lot of other people will talk about Rodney’s accomplishments, including his role in the founding of Genuity, his work with the DMA in the early days of spam, his efforts against SMS spam and his efforts to secure the Internet infrastructure. But I have a much more personal perspective.
Rodney was seminal in changing my life and career path. Back in 1999, Rodney asked Steve to look into some DNS creativity he was testing. A few months later, Rodney invited Steve to join a new company he was founding based on that DNS creativity. We moved out the the Bay area and Steve started working for UltraDNS in early 2000.
Moving out to the Bay Area triggered my career shift into anti-spam and anti-abuse. I started working at MAPS (now Trend Micro) in their experimental consulting service division. We were the “carrot” end of the equation, where our job was to help companies minimize the abuse coming out of their networks.
After MAPS went through a round of layoffs in 2001, Rodney started recommending me as an email consultant to some of his connections in the marketing world. This work was a success and directly led to the founding of Word to the Wise and everything that flows from that.
M3AAWG has published a video where Rodney discusses his role in the history of spam and some of the other things he’s done to fight junk advertising (both fax and SMS spam). He sued junk faxers in small claims court. He was instrumental in getting SMS spam covered under the TCPA. He wrote the first global opt-out list supported by both the DMA and the ISPs and proved that global opt-out would never work. He literally pulled the plug on spamming customers.
Rodney says he’s “Not smart, just the guy who carries the bags of money and helps the smart people get things done.” I certainly don’t believe that is true. He has done things on the global scale to make the Internet a safer place for end users. But my appreciation is much more personal. I will forever be grateful to him for starting us on this path and the help and advice he gave us so many years ago.

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