November 2016: The Month In Email

Happy December! Between #blackfriday, #cybermonday & #givingtuesday, pretty much everyone in the US has just survived a week of email from every brand and organization they’ve ever interacted with. Phew.
TurkeysforBlog
Is this still the best strategy for most senders? Maybe. But it’s always important to be adaptable and continue to evaluate and evolve your strategy as you move through the year.
As always, I continue to think about evolving our own strategies, and how we might best support senders and ESPs. One of the challenges we face when we talk to senders with deliverability questions is that so many of our answers fall into a nebulous “it depends” zone. We’re trying to articulate new ways to explain that to people, and to help them understand that the choices and details they specify at each point of their strategic planning and tactical execution have ramifications on their delivery. While “it depends” is still a correct answer, I’m going to try to avoid it going forward, and instead focus on exploring those choices and details with senders to help them improve deliverability.
In our community of deliverability and anti-abuse professionals, we are — as you’d expect — quite sensitive to unsolicited email that targets our industry. When an email circulates, even what seems like a reasonably well-thought-out email, it occasionally does not land well. Worse still are the various email-related product and service providers who try to legitimize B2B sales messaging as if it is something other than spam.
The takeaway from these discussions for senders is, as always: know your audience. This post about research from Litmus on millennials and spam is a great example of the kinds of things you might consider as you get to know your audience and how they prefer to communicate.
We also had a presidential election this month, one that made much of issues related to email, and it will be interesting to see how the candidates and parties use the email data they collected going forward.
In industry and security news, we saw over a million Google accounts breached by Android malware. We also saw some of the ramifications of a wildcard DNS entry from a domain name expiration — it’s an interesting “how things work” post if you’re curious. In other “how things work” news, we noted some of the recent changes AOL made to its FBL.
I answered an Ask Laura question about dedicated IP pools, and I have a few more queued up as well. As always, we want to know what questions are on the minds of our readers, so please feel free to send them over!

Google accounts breached
Outreach or spam?

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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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Don't forget the strategy

We’re two days out from the beginning of the Holiday Shopping Season here in the US. Three days out from one of the biggest retail shopping days of the year in the US. 5 days out from one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.
I’m sure everyone has their mail campaigns planned. Most of the messages are finished, just waiting for a tweak or the exact right image.
The challenge, during this time of year, is to actually think strategically about marketing. The challenge is to pay attention to what subscribers and ISPs are telling you. The challenge is to adapt to conditions on the ground, rather than just executing a strategy planned months ago.
I often joke that my job gets quiet around this time of the year. Most of my clients and customers are busy executing their strategy, not planning it. So much mail is being slung around that no one really has time to do any thinking about it. That is, of course, a gross exaggeration, smart email marketers are always considering strategy even as they’re in the middle of the holiday mailing season.  They still pay attention, they adapt to the conditions, they get the mail through.
Just remember, 2016 is almost over. But we still have a lot of email to send first.

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October 2016: The Month in Email

We’ve returned from London, where I spoke at the Email Innovations Summit and enjoyed a bit of vacation. My wrap-up post also mentions an article I wrote for the Only Influencers site, which looks at questions I get asked frequently: “Why does spam make it to the inbox and our legitimate marketing email doesn’t? Should we just copy their tactics?”
Parliament2ForBlog
In industry news, Yahoo caught our attention for two surprising moves: disabling forwarding and — much more disturbing — creating software for intelligence agencies to search customer email.
Some legal updates this month: The Second Court of Appeals upheld an earlier ruling that companies are in fact liable for the activities of their affiliates, including spam and fraudulent claims. This is important, as we often see spammers and cybercriminals use affiliates to distance themselves from these activities. We also saw another fine assessed for a violation of CASL, and noted with appreciation the transparency and thoughtful process that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) demonstrates in explaining their actions.
Another excellent report is the one created by the Exploratorium to explain their recent experience with being phished. It’s a good piece to share with your organization, in that it reminds us that these cybercriminals are exploiting not just our technology but our trust-based connections to our friends and colleagues. It’s important to raise awareness about social engineering as a part of information security. And speaking of email security, we were delighted to note that André Leduc received the 2016 J.D. Falk award this month at M3AAWG for his excellent work on this topic. It’s a fitting legacy to our friend, J.D., who died five years ago this month. We miss him.
Finally, we’d be remiss in observing Halloween without a post about zombies. Feel free to read it aloud in your spookiest voice.

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