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Back from M3AAWG

Last week was the another M³AAWG meeting in San Francisco. The conference was packed full of really interesting sessions and things to learn. Jayne’s keynote on Tuesday was great, and brought up a lot of memories of just what it was like to be fighting spam and online abuse in the mid to late 90s. It’s somewhat amazing to me that many of the people I first met, or even just heard about are still actively working to fight abuse and make the Internet safer.
Wednesday was another great keynote from Facebook, discussing security. Facebook is committed to sharing threat information and has started the ThreatExchange website as a hub for sharing data among large companies.
One thing that was amusing was during one talk someone mentioned YubiKey for managing logins. They said many people were sharing long strings of random keys that sometimes happen because someone has accidentally triggered the one time passcode. YubiKey is awesome, if sometimes ccccccdkhjnbitklrrtnhjrdfgdlhektfnfeutgtdcib inscrutable.
As has become a bit of a M³AAWG tradition lately, Wednesday was also kilt day. There may be pictures. For those of you planning to go to Dublin, Wednesday will be kilt day as well.
The conference was great, but ended on a bit of a down note. We received word that Wednesday night a long time friend, Ellen R., passed away due to complications from a stroke. The conference held a moment of silence for her at the end. Ellen was a friend as well as a colleague. She was around on IRC when we started this crazy experiment called Word to the Wise and was always helpful and insightful. She volunteered with, and then worked for, Spamcop and then volunteered with Spamhaus. Ellen will be very missed.
I started off the conference remembering all the friends I made back in the late 90s and ended it remembering and missing those who are no longer around. Email has been one amazing journey, and doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon.

Mary Litynski Award winner Jayne Hitchcock

This morning the Messaging, Mobile and Malware Anti-Abuse Working Group announced the winner of the Mary Litynski Award.
Congratulations to Jayne Hitchcock of WHO@ for her work over the last 2 decades fighting online abuse and cyberstalking.
I’ve never actually met Jayne, but I do remember following her story in the late 90s. She started off trying to protect people from being scammed by Woodside Literary Agency. In return for her work to inform and protect people the principals of Woodside set out on a multi-year harassment campaign against her.
This was in the late 90s and the Internet was very new. There weren’t any laws. There weren’t really abuse desks. We had to protect each other. Law enforcement didn’t know what to do with problems. There weren’t any laws against harassment online. The word “cyberstalking” was created by a reporter when describing what was happening to Jayne.
Jayne has been a force for good online and she and her volunteers help people who are victims of abuse online and cyberstalking. She’s been instrumental in getting anti-cyberstalking laws passed and helping law enforcement understand why online abuse is an issue and that it should be addressed.

'Tis the season

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It’s the time of the year, when we celebrate a holiday by telling you about email.

What is an open?

I was having a discussion today with a few industry colleagues about engagement and open rates. It was a good discussion and inspired a couple blog posts. Engagement totally matters, Engagement affects deliverability, and ISPs should be the last of your concerns.
I think they’ve covered the engagement issue pretty well, but what I wanted to talk about was metrics, specifically opens. Open is a fairly simple word, and it’s used in email all the time. Recipients open email. Mailbox providers measure that open. Senders measure that open.
It’s critical to remember, though, that open rates as measured by free mailbox provider and open rates tracked by a sender are not really the same thing. They’re measured in very different ways, and there is not a 1:1 mapping between the two measurements.

Email Authentication in a nutshell

There are 3 types of authentication currently in use for email.

January 2015 – The Month in Email

It’s February already! January went fast, right? At WttW, we are gearing up for MAAWG SF later this month — will we see you there?
We started the year with a set of predictions about email. Mostly we think email will continue to be great at some things and not-so-great at other things, and we’ll keep fighting the good fight to make it better.
As always, I’m interested in filters and how spammers continue to work around them to reach the inbox. I also wrote about how the language of an email impacts delivery, and wrote an expanded response to a comment suggesting email filters should be illegal. You can guess where I stand on that (and if you can’t, perhaps you might read more about how email is an inherently malicious traffic stream…)
I also took a moment to point out a trend I’m really enjoying, which is the rise of content marketing (a.k.a. giving customers useful and interesting information they can’t find elsewhere). As I said in the post, I’ll be curious to see how ROI plays out with this strategy.
We also talked about some of the less exciting content we see in email, notably the infamous Murkowski Statement, by which a spammer declares “Nope! Nothing to see over here!”
Steve also pointed out some content shenanigans in the form of hidden preview text, with some additional clarification from the original marketer in the comments.
In industry news, the big story was that Microsoft has partially implemented DMARC for Office365, and was the first to make a public statement about the specific ways they’ve chosen to implement. In my post, I did a walkthrough of a message to illustrate a bit about how this works, which might be useful if you’re trying to wrap your head around DMARC implementations.
We also talked about consolidation in the ESP space, and got a number of comments from readers about who they think might be next. Shortly thereafter, Listcast was acquired by MailerMailer.
Josh noted a few major shutdowns: Yahoo China email services and the AHBL list. The latter explores the challenges inherent in decommissioning a blacklist, and there’s a good discussion in the comments, so you might check it out if you missed that earlier this month.
Josh also pointed to the Salesforce State of Marketing report, which is always a useful set of metrics about how marketers are using email and other channels. It’s definitely worth a read.

MessageSystems Acquires Port25

This morning MessageSystems announced they had acquired Port25 systems. These two platforms were some of the powerhouse brands in the email space. Momentum was the system used by big programs that needed precise control over all their mail from many different streams. Port25 was a lower cost but still powerful system that was accessible to many different size companies.
This acquisition gives MessageSystems the ability to address both market segments.
Port25 staff are all part of the acquisition and the software will continue to be developed and maintained as a separate product from the Momentum line. I, for one, am relieved to hear that. Port25 is a solid piece of software that meets the sending needs of many small and medium size companies.
Congratulations to the great folks at MessageSystems and Port25. I’m excited to see what happens with both programs under the same roof.

ISPs speak at the EEC conference

Massimo Arrigoni has a great blog post up summarizing the final session of the EEC conference with representatives from major mailbox providers. This session a number of representatives from major mailbox providers spoke about what it takes to get to the inbox. They discussed what engagement really was, why you need to warmup and what the mailbox providers are measuring.
The short version is delivery is becoming more and more personalized. It’s not about if a mailbox provider thinks mail is spam, it’s about if a mailbox provider thinks this recipient thinks the mail will be spam. It’s all about connecting with each individual recipient.
None of this should be news to any of our regular readers. We’ve long talked about how ISPs measure things differently than senders. We’ve also talked about personalized delivery and how IP reputation isn’t the most important part of delivery.
Know your recipients. Make them want your mail and it will end up in the inbox. ‘
Edit: EmailCopilot also has more information on the ISP session at EEC.

Amazon launching new email service WorkMail

Amazon is launching a new email service called Amazon WorkMail. Amazon already offers a Simple Email Service (SES) that allows customers to send outbound-only emails and unlike SES, WorkMail will be a full feature email, calendaring, and client management product. The new WorkMail mail service will compete with enterprise email solutions such as Microsoft Exchange Server. WorkMail will support the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol, something that Google disabled with Gmail in early 2013, and will include Mobile Device Management and Active Directory Integration. The new service will also utilize Amazon’s AWS Key Management Service that allows the customer to create and control their own encryption keys used to encrypt their data on AWS.
Amazon WorkMail will also scan all incoming and outgoing email for spam, malware, and viruses, however, it’s not clear yet if they are going with a third-party solution or will be creating their own filtering system.

Everyone.net SMTP Issues

Everyone.net engineers are investigating a SMTP connectivity issue.
Everyone.net Status Page