June 2016: The Month in Email

We’re officially halfway through 2016, and looking forward to a slightly less hectic month around here. I hope you’re enjoying your summer (or winter, for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere).
 

Trinity College Dublin, 2015 © Laura Atkins
Trinity College Dublin, 2015 © Laura Atkins
 
Our first June blog post marked the fifteen year anniversary of the very first anti-spam conference, SpamCon. As I noted, many of the people at that conference are still working in the email space — and many of the same spammers are still working in email too. We were also delighted to see that one of the worst of them, Sanford “Spamford” Wallace, was finally sentenced to jail time for his exploits.
We’ve also been longtime members of the M3AAWG community, and as the 37th meeting convened in Philadelphia this month, I wrote about some of what makes that group work so well.
As we inch closer and closer to the November election, we see more and more email from candidates, PACs, and other interest groups. I wrote about some of the challenges these senders face with spam filtering, both in terms of content and bad subscriber data.
Filtering, as I often reiterate, is increasingly a function of permission. You need to be invited into the inbox, and if you’re not, your mail will be filtered. Permission isn’t transferable. It can’t be shared from one list to another. If you’ve purchased addresses, you don’t have permission to mail those recipients, and your mail doesn’t belong in the inbox. People often call us to see how they might work around this lack of permission, and we’re constantly explaining why we can’t help them with that. Not convinced? Here’s another post about who owns the inbox, with some detail from my panel at Connections 16 and a followup post from Litmus.
Another deliverability question that came up at a recent panel discussion was about role accounts, so I wrote up some thoughts on how these are used and the specific challenges of delivering to these accounts.
In technical topics, I wrote a long guide to bounce handling, and we had some good discussion in the comments, which I always like (hint, hint!). Steve wrote about our experience (and others’) with TLS certificates, specifically with Comodo, who have failed their customers in numerous less-than-ethical ways. Steve also wrote a post about domain transparency, and how important it is for recipients to be able to understand where their email is coming from.
For my Ask Laura column, I answered a question about using video content in email. There are currently no standards for using rich media in email, and as such, this content can create delivery challenges. In a related topic, I wrote about the way that content complexity affects delivery, and some tools marketers can use to help with this.

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This month in email: October 2013

What did we talk about in October? Let’s take a look back over this month.

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September 2015: The month in email

SeptemberCalendarSeptember’s big adventure was our trip to Stockholm, where I gave the keynote address at the APSIS Conference (Look for a wrapup post with beautiful photos of palaces soon!) and had lots of interesting conversations about all things email-related.
Now that we’re back, we’re working with clients as they prepare for the holiday mailing season. We wrote a post on why it’s so important to make sure you’ve optimized your deliverability strategy and resolved any open issues well in advance of your sends. Steve covered some similar territory in his post “Outrunning the Bear”. If you haven’t started planning, start now. If you need some help, give us a call.
In that post, we talked a bit about the increased volumes of both marketing and transactional email during the holiday season, and I did a followup post this week about how transactional email is defined — or not — both by practice and by law. I also wrote a bit about reputation and once again emphasized that sending mail people actually want is really the only strategy that can work in the long term.
While we were gone, I got a lot of spam, including a depressing amount of what I call “legitimate spam” — not just porn and pharmaceuticals, but legitimate companies with appalling address acquisition and sending strategies. I also wrote about spamtraps again (bookmark this post if you need more information on spamtraps, as I linked to several previous discussions we’ve had on the subject) and how we need to start viewing them as symptoms of larger list problems, not something that, once eradicated, means a list is healthy. I also posted about Jan Schaumann’s survey on internet operations, and how this relates to the larger discussions we’ve had on the power of systems administrators to manage mail (see Meri’s excellent post here<).
I wrote about privacy and tracking online and how it’s shifted over the past two decades. With marketers collecting and tracking more and more data, including personally-identifiable information (PII), the risks of organizational doxxing are significant. Moreso than ever before, marketers need to be aware of security issues. On the topic of security and cybercrime, Steve posted about two factor authentication, and how companies might consider providing incentives for customers to adopt this model.

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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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