Recent Posts

First BACN, now SCRAPPLE

There is a lot of mail that goes out to recipients that’s not really spam, but isn’t fully wanted. To describe these different kinds of mail, people have invented pork-product related terminology. Ham and bacn are both used to describe wanted mail, although possibly not wanted right now.
Now we have SCRAPPLE. It seems over the weekend a number of members of the Science Fiction Writers Association received email from someone asking them to consider one of his writings for an award. Reading through the tweets, this person typed hundreds of email addresses out of the SFWA directory into their mail client. And then sent mail to that list.
Recipients of that mail then went to twitter to complain about abuse of their email addresses in this way. Being writers, they discussed what word that would describe “something like spam, but not really.”
@talkwordy came up with Scrapple. Now, for those of you who don’t live in a very small part of the mid-Atlantic region, you may not know what scrapple is. Scrapple is a loaf pork product made from, well, scraps of pig. It often has a weird greenish tinge to it, presumably from the liver. My grandmother, having grown up in that small part of the mid-Atlantic region, used to eat it when she could find it. Usually it was in small, country diners where the waitresses call you darlin’ or hun.
By the end of the discussion the definition of scrapple was: Unwanted email from a person you know, which is annoying but not completely irrelevant to your interests, often manual address list creation.
There you have it. Scrapple joins bacn, ham, spam, and spim to describe different kinds of email.

iMessage Spam

iMessage is the Apple messaging system that lets folks send short messages to one another over WiFi. In December I received my first iMessage spam.
I’m not even really sure how to report it or how to report it to.
Mobile spam is a hot button issue right now, but the tools just aren’t around to control SMS, iMessage and TXT spam like there is with email. And even though sending unsolicited messages to a mobile device is against several laws here in the US, there does seem to be a core of spammers that continue to send.

Images, again

It’s a new year, but an old problem. Email with unloaded images.
Sure, you should be including critical content as text, and/or including alt-text as a normal part of your creative design process, but at the bare minimum you should look at what your mail looks like without images.
The last thing you want to do is send out email with just one strong call to action – the unsubscribe link.

CASL and existing opt-in addresses

The Canadian Anti-Spam law takes effect this summer. EmailKarma has a guest post by Shaun Brown that talks about how to handle current opt-in subscribers under the law.

And we're back

Happy New Year!
I am back and ready to talk email with folks.
December is always a busy time, both between the holidays and all associated personal stuff, but also for delivery consulting. There are senders that suddenly discover their email going to the bulk folder and needing help and assistance. But now it’s January and email marketing gets a brief break.
The beginning of the new year and the lull after the Christmas season marketing storm is a good place for folks to think about marketing and email goals for the upcoming years. Many senders get so wrapped up in the day to day details of email that they fail to think strategically about email and their business.
It works much that way for me, as well. I hate it when my clients have bad delivery and do everything I can to fix their problems. If their mail isn’t getting to the inbox, then it’s as much my problem as theirs. I’m thinking and working to get to the root of their problem and come up with solutions to get their mail sent. This sometimes means my own strategic planning gets pushed aside while I focus on client needs. January is a fun time of year for me, because it’s all a little more relaxed and I can look at the new year and how to improve services and share more of my knowledge with folks.
You’ll start to see some of those improvements in the upcoming months. I’ll also be blogging regularly. We should be getting some research and white papers out over the next few months. I’ll be catching up on the Google privacy cases and updating on some other email related lawsuits.
2014 is looking like a year of growth and excitement.

Responsys bought by Oracle

Being on the west coast, I’m usually not yet awake when the 9am eastern press releases go out. So I’m often late on BREAKING NEWS!! in the email industry.
This morning it was the news that Oracle bought Responsys. Most news reports seem to agree that the purchase price was $1.5B, although a couple places are putting that at a lower figure of “about $1.39B.”
In any case, congrats to Responsys shareholders for getting a premium on their stock price.

ROKSO

ROKSO is the Register of Known Spamming Operations. It is a list of groups that have been disconnected from more than 3 different networks for spamming. ROKSO is a little bit different than most of the Spamhaus lists. The listings themselves talk more about the background of the listees and less about the specific emails that are the problem.
Many ISPs and ESPs use ROKSO during customer vetting processes.
Networks can be listed on ROKSO without any mail being sent from those networks. These listings are as much about just categorizing and recording associated networks as they are about blocking spam.
Spamhaus does not accept delisting requests for ROKSO records. In order to be delisted from ROKSO there must be a 6 month period with no spam traceable to the ROKSO entity. After that 6 months the listee can petition for a review of the record. If the spam has stopped their record is retired.
In my experience there is often a lot of research put into each ROKSO record and not all that information is made public.
The only time a record is changed is if Spamhaus is convinced they made a mistake. This does happen, but it’s not that common. Given the amount of research that goes into a ROKSO record, there is a fairly high burden of proof to demonstrate that the information is actually incorrect.
It is possible to get delisted off ROKSO. In all of the cases I know about, the listed entity either got out of email altogether or they radically changed their business model.

That unsubscribe time of year

Like many people, I make purchases online. This usually means the vendor adds me to their mailing list. I normally don’t care, that mail all filters to my “commercial” folder (my own personal version of tabs) and I can browse it at my leisure.
At this time of year, though, email marketers go into a bit of overdrive and that folder fills with 20 – 30 or more emails a day. The volume is no so much of a problem, but it can get annoying to try and find mail I want in all the crud from random vendors.
In some cases, I don’t even know who the company is or why they have my address. Today’s example was a florist in Maryland. Eventually I figured out I’d purchased from them back in 2007 to send flowers to a colleague when her mother passed away. Apparently, they’re doing so badly they need every dollar they can find.
What it does mean, though, is that I unsubscribe from more mail in December than I do through the rest of the year. I don’t mind the occasional mail, even weekly is no big deal. But when that frequency drastically increases, or someone has not bothered to mail me for 5+ years, I just don’t want that mail anymore.
Dana Perino used the term ‘unsubscribe Tuesday‘

Gmail opens… anyone seeing changes?

I’m wondering if people are seeing any changes in open rates now that gmail defaulted to on.
Anyone got any quick feedback?

Gmail speaks on image caching

Gmail released a blog post last week discussing their new image caching and why they implemented it. The short version is this is a way to improve the gmail user experience by screening images for malicious activity and serving the images faster from the Google caching machines.