Standards

Thinking about the concept of best practices

In 2010 Chad White declared best practices dead.

Frankly, the term has always been too “big tent” to be truly useful. When “don’t buy email lists” and “use buttons for primary calls-to-action” are both best practices, it’s no wonder there’s confusion. What we need is new language that differentiates those practices that are a litmus test for legitimate email marketers vs. spammers, from practices that are simply wise.
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Six months or out

Mickey Chandler has a great post up about Triage vs. Planning. Where he talks about the decisions you make differ depending on the context.
It’s a good read, and I strongly encourage everyone to go give it a look.
But his post led me to a post by Andrew Kordek at Trendline where he claims that there is an industry rule of thumb that says 6 months is the rule of thumb to define an inactive.
Wait, What?
I know there’s a huge amount of controversy in the email space about whether or not you should purge inactive addresses. I know there are some very vocal people who think that removing inactive addresses is tantamount to marketing suicide. But where did 6 months come from? Who made it an industry standard?
If we don’t know where the standard came from, if we don’t know why we’re doing it then what kind of mickey mouse industry are we running here?
There is a lot about email marketing that is empirical. You poke the black box on one side and see what happens on the other. The problem with that is, that we can “discover” a lot of effects that aren’t real, but somehow turn into “you must do this!”
I have no doubt there are times when a 6 month expiry is a good idea. A number of my clients over the last few years use a much, much shorter time because that’s what works for them. I also know there are times when longer expiry times are a good idea, too.
It’s really important that when you’re making decisions about your email marketing program that you don’t mindlessly apply “standards” to what you’re doing. Think about the practical effects of your decisions and put them in context with your overall business plan.
To do otherwise is to kneecap your email marketing program.

Expiring emails

J.D. Falk posts over on the Return Path blog about the new proposed standard for expiring email. It’s an interesting concept, but like J.D. I don’t see it going very far.

Return Path Changes certification standards

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

Senders need to take responsibility

Having just returned home from another conference, my head is full of new ideas, new thoughts and new projects. I enjoy seeing old friends, making new contacts and sharing ideas. One thing I don’t enjoy, though, is listening to senders and marketers complaining about how hard it is to be a sender because the ISPs will not tell them what standards they need to meet.
If the ISPs would just tell us what they want us to do, we’ll do it.

The ISPs have told senders what they want them to do. They want senders to stop sending mail that their users don’t want. It is a very simple statement.
Stop sending spam.

For many senders, however, it’s not enough. “Tell us exactly what we need to do to stop sending spam. What complaint rates must we be under? What bounce rates do we have to be under? How do you want us to do this?” By this point in the conversation the ISP person is mentally rolling their eyes and looking for a way to escape the conversation.
The ISPs don’t want to tell senders how to behave, they want senders to start behaving. Stop sending spam should be all they need to tell senders.
Senders who ask for ISPs to tell them how to stop sending mail recipients think is spam are looking for specific thresholds they can stay under. They’re not really interested in actually sending wanted mail, they’re interested in sending good-enough mail, where good-enough mail is simply mail that gets to the inbox.
Want to know why ISPs don’t think much of many senders? Because the senders are not visibly taking any stand against abuse. I know there are a lot of senders out there who stop a lot of spam from ever leaving their systems, but there’s also a lot of unwanted mail that goes out, too. Some of that mail is even spam by any definition of the word. All the ISPs can see is the spam that gets through, and then they hear just tell us what to do and we’ll do it. From an ISP perspective, this means the senders only care about the thresholds and getting in under the ISPs’ radars.
Senders need to take more responsibility for the mail that goes out over their networks.
What do I mean by this? I mean senders need to stop waiting for the ISPs to define good practices. Senders need to implement standards and good practices just because they’re good practices, not because the ISPs are dictating the practices. Senders need to stop customers from doing bad things, and dump them if they won’t stop. Senders need to stop relying on ISPs for specific answers to why mail is being blocked. Senders need to take responsibility for the mail going across their networks.
It’s time for senders to grow up and stop relying on others for guidance. They shouldn’t implement good practices just because the ISPs tell them to, but instead should implement good practices because they are good practices.

Update on FixOutlook.org campaign

Last week I mentioned that the Email Standards Project has started a website (FixOutlook.org) and a twitter campaign to pressure Microsoft to use a HTML compliant rendering engine for Outlook. Currently Outlook uses the HTML engine in MS Word and that engine is not fully compliant with of the HTML standards as published by W3C.org.
Microsoft did reply to the FixOutlook.org campaign on the MSDN Developer blog. The money quote, which they bolded for emphasis in the original post:

Email standards and formatting

There is a lot of buzz on twitter and the email blogs today about Microsoft’s decision to use the HTML rendering engine from MS Word in Outlook 2010 instead of the HTML rendering engine from Explorer. The people behind the Email Standards Project have set up FixOutlook.org and are asking people to join twitter to and tweet the fixoutlook.org URL to send a message to Microsoft.
I’ve been thinking about this much of the morning, and considering Microsoft’s history with implementation of standards. Microsoft has never really followed many of the Internet standards. They adopt what they like, and create new “standards” that work with MS products. This has worked for them, given their position in the market. Companies and software developers that wanted to interoperate with Microsoft software had to comply with Microsoft, Microsoft never had to comply with them.
I find it extremely unlikely that this effort will cause Microsoft to deviate from their course. Based on Microsoft’s history, the solution is not for Microsoft to change rendering in Outlook, but for everyone else to change how they do things.
Mark Brownlow blogged on the topic, too, and makes another of his insightful points. Email marketers and email designers are not an important user group to Microsoft. Instead, they’re focused on the actual people who use Outlook to send and receive email.

How to be a spammer

JD had a comment on my Valentines day semi-fluff post, that really summed up the reality for senders. He said

Yahoo and Spamhaus

Yahoo has updated and modified their postmaster pages. They have also put a lot of work into clarifying their response codes. The changes should help senders identify and troubleshoot problems without relying on individual help from Yahoo.
There is one major change that deserves its own discussion. Yahoo is now using the SBL, XBL and PBL to block connections from listed IP addresses. These are public blocklists run by Spamhaus. Each of them targets a different type of spam source.
The SBL is the blocklist that addresses fixed spam sources. To get listed on the SBL, a sender is sending email to people who have never requested it. Typically, this involves email sent to an address that has not opted in to the email. These addresses, known as spamtraps, are used as sentinel addresses. Any mail sent to them is, by definition, not opt-in. These addresses are never signed up to any email address lists by the person who owns the email address. Spamtraps can get onto a mailing list in a number of different ways, but none of them involve the owner of the address giving the sender permission to email them.
Additionally, the SBL will list spam gangs and spam supporters. Spam supporters include networks that provide services to spammers and do not take prompt action to remove the spammers from their services.
The XBL is a list of IP addresses which appear to be infected with trojans or spamware or can be used by hackers to send spam (open proxies or open relays). This list includes both the CBL and the NJABL open proxy list. The CBL list machines which appear to be infected with spamware or trojans. The CBL works passively, looking only at those machines which actively make connections to CBL detectors. NJABL lists machines that are open proxies and open relays.
The Policy Block List (PBL) is Spamhaus’ newest list. Spamhaus describes this list as

Changes at Comcast

I can usually tell when one of the ISPs makes some change to their incoming spam filtering just by my call volume. The past few weeks the ISP in most of my calls has been Comcast. And, what do you know, they have made changes to how they are filtering email.
According to their bounce message, Comcast is using ReturnPath’s proprietary SenderScore product to filter mail. Reports on thresholds vary, but IPs with SenderScores of 70 and below have been blocked with messages similar to:

Blocklists and standards

I received a comment this morning on my post about e360 v. Spamhaus, which I think brings up a point that deserves a post of it’s own. Skinny says: