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The power of email marketing

Email is a helluva drug. That must be why I’m sitting here in a hotel room in Chicago where it’s minus something-a-lot outside and the roads are full of ice, salt and dingy snow.
It seemed like such a great idea at the time. Virgin America sent me an email advertising a 20% off sale for 20 hours. Al has been bugging us to come visit him in Chicago for months and I could get a storming deal on tickets. I poked around various websites and found a decent deal on a mini-suite at a hotel in downtown, just a block off Michigan Avenue.
It will be fun! The lights! Christmas Shopping! Maybe see some snow!
Well, we got the lights. We got to watch Christmas shoppers hurry along the avenue. We got to see the ice on the lake and throw snowballs. We even got to walk outside in a gentle snowfall on Saturday.
I realized, though, that I no longer have outerwear appropriate for midwest winters. I remember my years in Madison fondly, but I seem to have forgotten that I lived in 2 – 4 layers between September and March. I have forgotten that gloves and a scarf are not a fashion accessory, but are a necessity.
It was email marketing that reminded me of all that. And I have my fill of cold and snow and ice for a while.
Had a great time in the city, and Al was a wonderful host. But I’m ready to go back to my warm California, where as a friend of mine commented, “we keep the snow in the mountains where you can visit it.”

Unsubscribe preference centers

I unsubscribe from a lot of opt-in lists around this time of year. I’m generally unbothered by a couple emails a week from companies I’ve purchased from in the past. But, a lot of these companies drastically increase their volume mid-November. I may not be averse to 3 emails a week, but that absolutely does not mean I want 2 emails a day.

FAQ about opens and Gmail caching

I had hoped to blog about something else today, but this still seems to be a big concern for a number of people. There are a lot of questions running around, some of which we don’t have answers to, others of which we have answers based on some evidence.
It’s important to remember that we’ve seen Gmail roll things out and then roll things back and do phased transitions during deployment. What various people are reporting about images and caching and headers are accurate at the time they are tested. But they may not be accurate tomorrow or in a week or in a month.
I’ve also discovered through this process that a lot of different providers use significantly different image tracking in order to record image loads. Some of these techniques seem to be more resistant to Google’s new image loading process than others.
Why is this all so important?
Image tracking has become a fundamental part of email marketing. It’s something that can be measured, and so a lot of marketers evaluate the effectiveness of an email send based partially on open rate.
How does open tracking work?
For open tracking, ESPs inject a uniquely tagged image into the email. When the recipient opens an email and has images on, the email client calls to the sender server and asks the sender server for all the images in the email. When the tagged image is returned to the recipient, the server records an “open.”
How does caching break open tracking?
Caching means that only the first load of an image is provided by the sender’s server. Subsequent loads of an image are served by the caching proxy. Caching proxies are nothing new; they just haven’t affected email enough in the past for us to have to talk about it.
Why are some people reporting zero problems?
The first load of a unique image always happens. Some folks don’t measure repeat opens, so they’re not even noticing any changes in their reporting thus are saying they’re seeing no problems.
What else is image tracking used for?
Image tracking can also be used for device detection by reading the “user-agent” string that each device returns. Gmail is currently rewriting the “user-agent” string thus breaking all device detection. The string is unique enough that it would be possible to tag those opens as “opened through gmail web interface.” Gmail may decide to pass through the user agent in the future, the HTTP standard does allow for that.
Image tracking can also be used for geolocation. Some senders use the location of an IP address to return images relevant to a user’s location. The accuracy of geolocation is totally dependent on the accuracy of the IP to location database used; it is a best guess of the user’s location. Gmail is currently not passing through the user’s IP address when requesting the original image. I don’t expect them to start, given they also don’t reveal user IPs when Gmail web users send mail. This falls in the same category of privacy protection.
Is there a workaround?
I have heard of a few people claiming they have a fix. The problem is all of the fixes I have seen involve doing things that violate the HTTP RFCs. For instance, the “fix” or “workaround” discussed at E-Mail Marketing Tipps is to not send back an image at all. This is working now to track repeat opens, but Gmail may adapt and block this as well. It’s also possible that Gmail may decide people trying to “work around” Gmail’s cache should be blocked outright for violating the HTTP spec.
Where can I find more information?
Other blog posts on the issue, including research on what people have seen.

More info about Gmail image caching

A lot of people are discussing the new Gmail image caching around the web.
This doesn’t yet appear to be rolled out across all of Google’s network, so some people in different parts of the world are reporting different behaviors. This is leading to a little bit of confusion, as folks are reporting things like seeing multiple opens for a single image. These reports are clearly accurate, but may only be an artifact of a slow rollout across the network.
There are a couple bullet points I think are important.

Email against Humanity

“Sending an email is one of the worst things you can do to a person. You are stealing a little part of their life away. 99.99% of all emails are incredibly annoying and a huge imposition. If your job is to write emails, you should always be fighting to send fewer things and make sure each email you send is so incredible that it’s a rare treat to hear from you.”
Cards Against Humanity at MailChimp

Gmail deploys image proxy servers

This afternoon Justin Foster of LiveClicker posted to the OnlyInfluencers list asking about Gmail rewriting links.

Canada announces CASL regulation start date

This morning Industry Canada published its final regulations regarding the implementation of the Canadian Anti-Spam Law. Email related provisions of the law will take effect June 1, 2014.
What does this mean? It means that anyone sending mail from Canada or anyone sending mail that is accessed in Canada is required to have explicit opt-in consent for sending that mail, with a few exceptions. These exceptions include commercial electronic messages that are:

Open relays

Spamhaus wrote about the return of open relays yesterday. What they’re seeing today matches what I see: there is fairly consistent abuse of open relays to send spam. As spam problems go it’s not as serious as compromised machines or abuse-tolerant ESPs / ISPs/ freemail providers – either in terms of volume or user inbox experience – but it’s definitely part of the problem.
I’m not sure how much of a new problem it is, though.
Spammers scan the ‘net for mailservers and attempt to relay email through them back to email addresses they control. Any mail that’s delivered is a sign of an open relay. They typically put the IP address of the mailserver they connected to in the subject line of the email, making it easy for them to mechanically extract a list of open relays.
We run some honeypots that will accept and log any transaction, which looks just like an open relay to spammers other than not actually relaying any email. They let us see what’s going on. Here’s a fairly typical recent relay attempt:

SBCGlobal having a bad day

I’m seeing scattered reports of the SBCGlobal.net MTAs refusing connections. No current information about fixes.

Private whois records hide spammers and help bring down a registrar

I’ve talked in the past about how many spam filters, ISPs and blocklists treat domains that are registered behind privacy protection. I’ve written about how many commercial domains behind privacy protection are used for fraud. I’ve written about multiple legal cases where the courts ruled against companies using privacy protected domains in email. I’ve even gone so far as to claim hiding domains behind privacy protection is what spammers do.
Legitimate email marketers do not hide their domains behind privacy protection services.
Spammers absolutely do hide behind privacy protection services. And because of how privacy protection works, we really don’t know which domains are used by one spammer versus another spammer. ICANN gave us a little bit of insight into just how many domains a spammer registers when they terminated Dynamic Dolphin (pdf link). This is a situation that has been brewing for most of 2013. I wrote about the notice of contract breach back in October. This morning Brian Krebs wrote a blog post saying that ICANN had terminated the agreement with Dynamic Dolphin for failing to cure the breach as noticed back in October.
If you read through the timeline, ICANN has some interesting information about privacy protected domains at Dynamic Dolphin. Data about privacy protected domains was requested from the very beginning.