As a digital channel, email provides a lot of different metrics for marketers to use. Not only can marketers measure things like open and click rates, but they can tie these numbers back to a particular recipient. This treasure trove of information leads to obsessing over making the numbers look good. For good deliverability senders want low bounce rates, low spamtrap rates, and high engagement...
September’s big adventure was our trip to Stockholm, where I gave the keynote address at the APSIS Conference (Look for a wrapup post with beautiful photos of palaces soon!) and had lots of interesting conversations about all things email-related. Now that we’re back, we’re working with clients as they prepare for the holiday mailing season. We wrote a post on why it’s so important to make sure...
I received mail from Mitusbishi UK over the weekend, telling me that as a subscriber I was eligible to buy a car from one of their dealers, or something. I didn’t actually read the whole thing. While I am competent in a right hand drive, even when it’s a manual, it’s not something I want to try over here in the US. The address the message came to is one that I’ve had for...
I use tom@hotmail.com as my default bogus email address. Tom has subscribed to so many things because of me. This is why address verification doesn’t work. The address tom@hotmail.com is a real address. It exists. It accepts mail. And at least one person admits to signing up Tom for mail that the person doesn’t want. I’m sure he’s not the only one. <- 250 OK -> MAIL...
People make all sorts of claims about typo traps. One claim that showed up recently was that Spamhaus has just started using typo traps. I asked my Facebook network when people started using typos to detect incoming spam. Two different colleagues mentioned using typos, both on the left hand side and the right hand side, back in ’98 and ’99. The point is, typo traps are absolutely...
Earlier this week some ESPs started asking if other ESPs have seen an uptick in Spamcop listings. The overwhelming answer (9 of 11 ESP representatives) said yes. I’ve also had clients start to ask me about Spamcop listings. All in all, there seems to be some changes at Spamcop that means more senders are showing up on the Spamcop radar. Luckily, Spamcop provides us some insight into their...
There’s been a lot of discussion about Spamhaus, spam traps, and blocking. Today, Spamhaus rep Denny Watson posted on the Spamhaus blog about some of the recent large retailer listings. He provides us with some very useful information about how Spamhaus works, and gives 3 case studies of recent listings specifically for transactional messages to traps. The whole thing is well worth a read...
Spamtraps on a list are a symptom, not the disease itself. They’re (usually) a sign of some serious underlying problem, whether it be with address capture, bounce management, list purchase or epending. We’ve talked about this a lot in the past, but sometimes you need a short summary to refer someone to. Spamtrap Mythology A brief guide to spamtraps Spamtraps: should you care? Badly...
There’s a great post over on CircleID from John Levine and his experience with a marketer sending mail to a spam trap. Apparently, some time back in 2002 someone opted in an address that didn’t belong to them to a marketing database. It may have been a hard to read scribble that was misread when the data was scanned (or typed) into the database. It could be that the person...
By creating web domains that contained commonly mistyped names, the investigators received emails that would otherwise not be delivered. Over six months they grabbed 20GB of data made up of 120,000 wrongly sent messages. BBC News The focus of the article is on how companies are opening themselves up to security holes. While most marketing email doesn’t come with security risks, some of it...
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