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I want to avoid network outages

Number six of seven in our occasional series on why ESPs need, or don’t need, lots of IP addresses to send mail properly.

The psychic and the not-really-opt-in

I’ve been getting a continual stream of spam from a psychic. I blogged about it a few months ago, and even had a call with the psychic’s ESP. None of that seemed to matter. Every few days I’d get another ad for psychic candles, or recording services or whatever. It wasn’t mail I could easily filter, and every time I’d get it I’d growl and dump it in my junk folder.
Yesterday, I received another mail from her. The subject line is “list opt-in verification.” Really? Could she really be actually confirming her list? Actually asking if I want to continue receiving mail?

Signing up for lists

How many email marketers hand over email addresses whenever asked? Are those of us in the email field more or less likely than the average consumer to sign up for something?
I sign up for a lot of mail, but there are different categories of that mail.
Mail I actually want from a company. Usually these are local companies where I visit their brick and mortar or an online only company that I actively buy from. I read the emails for the content and because I’m interested in the company and their products. I occasionally will actually analyze their headers and think about their sending practices. Usually I’m just interested in the sale they’re offering or the information they’re sharing. These companies get a tagged email address that goes into my main mailbox.
Mail where I’m interested in how the company is using email. Generally these are big, national brands. Sometimes they’ll ask me for an address during an offline transaction, other times I’ll make a purchase from. I’m not really interested in what they’re offering, but it’s good to keep an eye on how email is being used by large companies with expensive ad agencies and marketing departments. I do look at the headers of the mail, check their authentication and look at the format of the emails. These companies also get tagged address that goes right to my main mailbox.
One thing I don’t do is automatically provide email addresses to companies. This annoys some to no end. “We don’t have an email address on file for you. Do you have an email address?” They never ask if I want to give them the address, they just ask if I have one. I expect a lot of people just say, “Yes, it’s laura@example.com” and don’t think for a second this means they are opting in to mail from that company. I also think that some companies train their phone and sales reps to ask this way in order to get email addresses from people without informed consent.
I also do a lot of signups to client lists. This is mail I want as without copies of the email I can’t do the audits they’ve contracted me to do. I have a set of addresses that go to a special account and are automatically tagged with client and signup information so I can sort and filter by client and website and all sorts of fancy things. I spend a lot of time looking at the structure of the email. I look at headers for compliance with standards and to confirm any authentication is set up correctly. I look at the body for similar reasons.
I also sign up for some mail that I don’t really want to receive. For these classes of mail I have disposable addresses. This can be investigating affiliates (or potential affiliates) for clients. This can be for an ESP client who wants one of their customers investigated. Sometimes I can’t believe a website is for real so I sign up just to see what their hook is.
Using different addresses and different filtering schemes helps me keep all these email uses separate and clear. I can tell what category a mail is in just by the address that it was sent to. I can also filter on “To” addresses, meaning that mail I’ve signed up for doesn’t get caught in my spam filters. Complex? Yes. But it keeps me up to date not only on offers from companies I purchase from, but also on what others are doing in the email marketing world.

Confusing opt-in and opt-out

Harvard Business Review posted a blog earlier this week suggesting that all businesses should treat email marketing as an opt-out process. Unfortunately, the post seemed to me to conflate and confuse a number of things.
She mixes in potential customers providing business cards to an exhibitor at a trade show with current customers that are using a product. She promotes businesses using opt-out as a default communication practice, but then talks about giving customers preference centers to manage the contact.
Overall, it was a very confusing article.
For instance the author says:

Blocklists, delisting and extortion

As I’m sure many of you have heard by now there is a new blocklist called ‘nszones.’ This blocklist is apparently stealing data from a number of other publicly accessible blocklists, combining the data and then charging folks for delisting.
This is a scam attempting to extort money from people. The blocklist has no way to actually remove IPs from the parent zones and I’m pretty sure they won’t even remove IPs from their own zones. In this case, the blocklist is clearly a scam, but there are other lists that are actually used by some mailservers that do charge for removal.
No legitimate blocklist will ever expect a listee to pay for delisting. Ever.
I feel very strongly about this. In fact, one of the major blocklists is run off a domain owned by Word to the Wise. Occasionally, I get contacted by folks looking for help with a listing on that list and I will not take them on as a client. I will provide general advice and make sure that they are correctly contacting the blocklist but nothing more.
This is, to my mind, the only ethical thing to do. I don’t even want a hint of impropriety surrounding either myself or the blocklist. Charging money for delisting only feeds the conspiracy theories.
Charging listees for removal (or listing listees so those charges can be a revenue source) is likely to lead to poor quality data and a blocklist that’s not terribly accurate nor effective. Furthermore, if a list operator is unethical or confrontational in their interactions with listees, they’re probably equally unprofessional in their interactions with potential list users. This results in few recipient domains actually using the list to block mail. Lists that charge are not widely used and being listed on them often does not affect email delivery in any appreciable manner.

Listen to the experts

Two blog posts came out today interviewing big players in the email and delivery arena.
Over on the Unica blog, Len Shnyeder interviews Annalivia Ford who is a new member of their email operations team. She has had many years of experience in dealing with senders from the receiver position. She summarizes successful delivery as follows:

When an open is not a sign of interest

A lot of people, including myself, are using opens as one of the measures of engagement. This, as a general rule, is not a bad measure. However, there are people who will open email not because they’re interested in it, but because they know it is spam.
Take, for instance, the email address I acquired in 1993. Yes, I still have this address. I stopped using it to sign up for lists in 1999 and stopped using it for most of the rest of my mail around 2001. This address, though, is on any number of spam mailing lists. The spam that gets through is usually sent by hard-core spammers. The ISP that hosts that mailbox uses Communigate Pro to filter mail, so much of the casual spam is filtered.
Generally, if I open an email (and load images or click through) on that account it is only in order to track down a spammer. For instance, I’m getting a lot of spam there from affiliates offering me the opportunity to purchase printing services for a very low price. I have actually been opening the mail, and clicking through. But I’m not clicking through because I’m interested in purchasing. I’m clicking through to see if my reports to abuse@ printer are resulting in any action against the spammers. (They’re not).
The thing is, though, I know that by clicking through on ads, I’ve now been promoted by the spammer to the “clicks on emails! it’s a live address!” list. Which only means I’m going to get more spam from them. Lucky me.
Using clicks and opens as a measure of engagement isn’t necessarily bad. But when using them you have to understand the limitations of the measurement and that what you may think it’s telling you isn’t actually what it’s telling you.

This is why the ISPs throw up their hands at senders

I recently saw a question from an ESP rep asking if anyone had a personal contact at a particular ISP. The problem was that they had a rejection from the ISP saying: 571 5.7.1 too many recipients this session. The ESP was looking for someone at the ISP in order to ask what the problem was.
This is exactly the kind of behaviour that drives ISPs bonkers about senders. The ISP has sent a perfectly understandable rejection: “5.7.1: too many recipients this session.” And instead of spending some time and energy on the sender side troubleshooting, instead of spending some of their own money to work out what’s going on, they fall back on asking the ISPs to explain what they should do differently.
What, exactly, should you do differently? Stop sending so many recipients in a single session. This is not rocket science. The ISP tells you exactly what you need to do differently, and your first reaction is to attempt to mail postmaster@ the ISP and then, when that bounces, your next step is to look for a personal contact?
No. No. No.
Look, connections and addresses per connections is one of the absolute easiest things to troubleshoot. Fire up a shell, telnet to port 25 on the recipient server, and do a hand SMTP session, count the number of receipts. Sure, in some corporate situations it can be a PITA to do, sometimes you’re going to need to get it done from a particular IP which may be an interface on an appliance and doesn’t have telnet or whatever. But, y’know what? That Is Your Job. If your company isn’t able to do it, well, please tell me so I can stop recommending that as an ESP. Companies have to be able to test and troubleshoot their own networks.
Senders have been begging ISPs for years “just tell us what you want and we’ll bother you less.” In this case the ISP was extremely clear about what they want: they want fewer recipients per connection. But the ESP delivery person is still looking for a contact so they can talk to the ISP to understand it better.
This is why the ISPs get so annoyed with senders. They’re tired of having to do the sender’s job.

Return Path Changes certification standards

Return Path recently announced changes to their certification program. They will no longer be certifying 3rd party mailers.

Define "spam"

A comment came through recently from Trent asking me to define spam. It’s been a while since I’ve talked about how I define spam, so let’s look at it.
Personally, I describe spam as unsolicited bulk email. If I didn’t ask for it and it looks like bulk mail then I consider it spam. In many cases the spammers have multiple email addresses of mine so I can demonstrate the mail was sent in bulk.
In my consulting and working with clients, though, I rarely use the word spam. There are so many different definitions of spam, I have no way to know if my clients understand what I am saying, so I avoid the term as much as humanly possible. An example of some of the few definitions of spam I’ve seen used over the years.