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2016 J.D. Falk Award

André Leduc received the 2016 J.D. Falk award this week at the Paris meeting of M3AAWG. He was recognized for spearheading two distinct projects.
The first was the Operation Safety Net – Best Practices to Address Online, Mobile, and Telephony Threats  This 76 page report was written by global security experts. One of the major goals of the report was to discuss security in language accessible to policy makers and management. The report, newly updated in 2015, is available at the M3AAWG website. Making technical language accessible is, to my mind, one of the most important parts of getting security recommendations implemented.
In addition to his work in making security recommendations accessible, André was the lead architect behind the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation. This legislation has greatly reduced the amount of spam received by Canadians. According to Leduc, CASL has improved permission practices by senders outside of Canada.
Congratulations to André.

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And… we're back from London

The Email Innovations Summit in London was a good conference. Much smaller than Vegas, but with a number of very interesting talks. I got to meet a number of folks I’ve only known online and we had some interesting conversations at the conference and at the pub-track in the evenings.
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I had so many grand plans for doing some work while in London. So many plans. And then I actually mostly disconnected and ignored anything I “should” be doing.  Instead, Steve and I did some touristing, some relaxing, some family time and some connecting with his college friends. We also (over)heard a lot of conversations about the US Election. One night at dinner every table around us was talking about our candidates and what they thought of them. It’s always interesting to hear what non-Americans think about our country.
In addition to missing two debates, it seems we missed some online news, too. I think the biggest thing was another large DDoS attack against that took out many major websites. I’m starting to see some comments that spam levels were down during the attack, too, but haven’t dug into that yet.
I did have an article published in the Only Influencers newsletter last week: Marketers Can’t Learn from Spam. All too often marketers think spammers are better at unboxing because they see spam in their inbox. But spammers are just more criminal and spend a lot of effort trying to bypass filters. These aren’t lessons marketers can learn from.
Unfortunately, due to our London trip, we are going to miss M3AAWG in Paris, which starts today. Two weeks between conferences was exactly the wrong time for going to both. Never fear, many folks will be tweeting what they can using #m3aawg38.
We’re both slowly getting back into the swing (and timezone!) of back to work. Blogging will pick up over the next few days. And I have new castle pictures to share.

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Yahoo disabled forwarding

Al posted about this over on his blog earlier this week. Yahoo has disabled the ability to forward email from one Yahoo account to an email account on a different system.
There is, of course, all sorts of speculation as to why forwarding has been disabled including speculation this has to do with holding on to accounts during the Verizon purchase. It’s certainly possible this is the case.
However, forwarding email is hard. Forwarding email on a large scale can result in spam blocks and delivery problems. It’s such an issue M3AAWG published a forwarding best practices document. It’s possible that Yahoo is making some changes on the back end to better implement the best practice recommendations. I don’t know, but it’s possible that Yahoo is telling the truth that they’re improving technology.

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Email Innovations Summit next week

I’m headed to London this weekend to speak at the Email Innovations summit next Thursday. It will be an updated version of “How to Talk Tech for Marketers” that I debuted in Vegas earlier this year.
Expect blogging to be light for the next 2 weeks while I’m gone. There are a few things I have to post, but I’m going to try and unplug and for part of the time I’m out of town.
 

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September 2016: The month in email

Happy October, everyone. As we prepare to head to London for the Email Innovations Summit, we’re taking a look back at our busy September. As always, we welcome your feedback, questions, and amusing anecdotes. Seriously, we could use some amusing anecdotes. Or cat pictures.
 
San Francisco and Coit tower
We continued to discuss the ongoing abuse and the larger issues raised by attacks across the larger internet infrastructure. It’s important to note that even when these attacks aren’t specifically targeting email senders, security issues affect all of us. It’s important for email marketers to understand that increased attacks do affect how customers view the email channel, and senders must take extra care to avoid the appearance of spam, phishing, or other fraudulent activity. I summarized some of the subscription form abuse issues that we’re seeing across the web, and noted responses from Spamhaus and others involved in fighting this abuse. We’re working closely with ESPs and policy groups to continue to document, analyze and strategize best practices to provide industry-wide responses to these attacks.
I was pleased to note that Google is stepping up with a new program, Project Shield, to help journalists and others who are being targeted by these attacks by providing hosting and DDoS protections.
I’m also delighted to see some significant improvements in email client interactions and user experiences. I wrote a bit about some of those here, and I added my thoughts to Al’s discussion of a new user interaction around unsubscribing in the iOS 10 mail client, and I’ll be curious to see how this plays out across other mail clients.
For our best practices coverage, Steve wrote about global suppression lists, and the ways these are used properly and improperly to prevent mail to certain addresses. I wrote about using the proper pathways and workflows to report abuse and get help with problems. I also wrote about the ways in which incentivizing address collection leads to fraud. This is something we really need to take seriously — the problem is more significant than some bad addresses cluttering up your lists. It contributes to the larger landscape of fraud and abuse online, and we need to figure out better ways to build sustainable email programs.
Is there such a thing as a perfect email? I revisited a post from 2011 and noted, as always, that a perfect email is less about technology and more about making sure that the communication is wanted and expected by the recipient. I know I sound like a broken record on this point (or whatever the 21st century equivalent metaphor of a broken record is….) but it’s something that bears repeating as marketers continue to evolve email programs.
We had a bit of a discussion about how senders try to negotiate anti-spam policies with their ESPs. Is this something you’ve experienced, either as a sender or an ESP?
In Ask Laura, I covered shared IP addresses and tagged email addresses, questions I get fairly frequently from marketers as they enhance their lists and manage their email infrastructures. As always, we welcome your questions on all things email delivery related.

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Yahoo collaborating with US intelligence agencies

Today it was revealed that Yahoo has been scanning people’s email for the federal government.

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Affiliates can be liable for fraud

An article popped up on LinkedIn about a recent 2nd court of appeals ruling that I thought was interesting.

Back in 2011, the FTC and the state of Connecticut filed suit against a company called LeanSpa and their affiliate marketer called LeadClick. LeanSpa sold various diet products through negative option marketing. LeadClick was the affiliate company they used to help drive traffic and customers to their websites.
LeadClick and their parent company was included in the suit because the FTC alleged that they were aware of and facilitated the false claims made by their affiliates. The case went to court and LeadClick lost. They appealed to the 2nd Circuit court. Last week the 2nd Circuit Court upheld the trial court’s finding of liability for LeadClick.
In its press release for the case, the FTC says:

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Ask Laura: Should we allow tagged addresses?

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Vague reports of Yahoo problems

A number of people, on different forums, have been asking if anyone is seeing a higher bounce rate than usual with Yahoo. Not sure exactly what’s going on here. As I understand it, folks are talking with Yahoo about it. If I hear anything more, I’ll share.
For now, though, if you’re seeing a small increase in Yahoo bounces (or other weirdnesses) others are seeing something odd, too.

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Censorship and free speech online

One of the things I discovered yesterday while looking at Krebs on Security was that Google Alphabet has a program to provide hosting and dDOS protection for journalists.  Project Shield, as it’s called, is a free service for approved applicants that keeps up websites that might be taken down otherwise. Eligible organizations include those providing news, information on human rights and monitoring elections.
This is something I hadn’t heard of before and my only reaction is good for Google.
Look, we’ve gotten to the point where attackers have resources beyond the scope that most of us can imagine. It’s expensive even for large organizations to manage and pay for the level of protection they need.
Even more importantly a lot of very important work is done by individuals or small organizations. Brian is a prime example of that. He does an incredible job investigating online crime on his own time. His site and his information is an invaluable resource for many. Losing his site, and losing his information would leave a huge hole in the security community. There are other folks in other spaces who, like Brian, don’t have the resources to protect themselves but do have important things to say and share.
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I’m glad to see Google committing their resources and skills to help organizations protect themselves. It’s so important that this work is done and we don’t lose voices just because they can’t afford hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
There has been abuse and harassment online for as long as I’ve been here. But it seems recently the size and severity of attacks have increased. And a lot of service providers are struggling with how to manage it and what their responsibilities are.
A few weeks ago Facebook deleted an iconic photo from the Vietnam era due to child nudity in the photo. That decision was reversed and discussed in many, many different places. One of the most interesting discussion happened on a friend’s Facebook feed. Many of the participants work at various online providers. They have to make these kinds of decisions and create policy to do the right thing – whatever the right thing is. It was very interesting to be able to follow the discussion and see how many different issues FB and other online providers have to consider when creating these types of policies.
I thing the thing I have to confront the most about the internet is how big it is. And how crucial it’s become to all sorts of issues. Social media can be a cesspool of abuse, there’s no question. But it can also be a force for good. I’m glad companies like Google are stepping up to preserve the good parts of the internet.

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