Recent Posts

Confirming addresses in the wild

A lot of marketers tell me “no sender confirms addresses” or “confirming addresses is too hard for the average subscriber.” I find both these arguments difficult to accept. Just today I subscribed to a mailing list that had a confirmation step. The subscription form was pretty simple.

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Things Spammers Do

Much like every other day, I got some spam today. Here’s a lightly edited copy of it.
Let’s go through it and see what they did that makes it clear that it’s spam, which companies helped them out, and what you should avoid doing to avoid looking like these spammers…

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Fickle recipients

One of the tenets of good delivery is know your recipients. Woot.com seems to know their recipients.
 
Happy Friday.

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Email is different

OMI responded to my post about data cleansing yesterday. She asked an interesting question:

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Data Cleansing part 2

In an effort to get a blog post out yesterday before yet another doctor’s appointment I did not do nearly enough research on the company I mentioned selling list cleansing data. As Al correctly pointed out in the comments they are currently listed on the SBL. And when I actually did the research I should have done it was clear this company has a long term history of sending unsolicited email.
Poor research and a quickly written blog post led to me endorsing a company that I absolutely shouldn’t have. And I do apologize for that.
With all that being said, Justin had a great question in the comments of yesterday’s post about data cleansing.

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Data Cleansing

According to Ken, Outward Media has productized a database of 300,000,000 email addresses that should never be mailed.

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Why so many domains

There’s a company that advertises a lot on TV. The ads are well done, they tell a clear story in the 30 seconds. They feature a pretty and happy young woman dancing around. There is a great catchy tune. From all appearances it’s a successful ad campaign.
The point of the ad campaign is to drive traffic to a website where the domain owner can collect a lot of information and sell it on to advertisers. Every month or so, the landing URL changes. In watching this campaign over the last year or two, I’ve seen at least half a dozen different URLs used in the television ads. Now, it’s perfectly possible that this is part of an overall strategy, but I am not sure. The initial website is highlighted so clearly in the catchy tune, I can’t believe it is part of their marketing strategy.
Which leads me to wonder if there is a bigger problem with their advertising. Do they change domains so frequently because they’re seeing domain based blocking?

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You opted in

One thing I get in some of the comments here and in some of the discussions I have with email senders is that no commercial emailer ever sends unsolicited email. That, clearly, at some point the recipient opted in to receive mail and if that person doesn’t want mail they shouldn’t ever give out their email address.
I have an old yahoo address that’s used primarily as my Flickr account login. I don’t believe I’ve ever given out the address to anyone or opted in to anything. Anything’s possible, this address was created sometime in 2006 or 2007 and I may have tossed it into a form to test something. It’s certainly not an address I ever actually use.
Earlier this week I checked mail on the account. There were almost 700 messages in there. It was pretty amazing how much garbage this unused, unshared address collected. Notice the “clever” use of foreign alphabets and the number of legitimate companies who have acquired this address or hired people to mail me on their behalf. I’m sure some of it is phishing, too.

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AOL improving

I’m hearing from lots of folks that they’re seeing some improvement in delivery to AOL accounts.
As everyone can imagine, the AOL situation has been a common thread of discussion on many delivery lists. One person even commented at how fragile the AOL mail server seems. My own thoughts are a little different. The AOL mail system is notoriously complex and integrated. Many of the folks who built it have been laid off or otherwise moved on to other companies. I know there are still smart, competent people riding herd on the AOL mail servers, but I expect they don’t have the resources to do the ongoing maintenance and the fire fighting and all the other tasks that a mailserver handling billions of emails needs.
What this means is that the AOL mail system has been suffering from bit rot for at least 2 years. It is to the original designers’ credit that it’s taken this long before there were major problems like we’ve seen over the last week.

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AOL: Still broken

I’m still hearing reports that AOL is still having problems accepting mail. I’ve also heard they’re still working on it. There is no information on when a fix may be finished.

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