Microsoft’s New Smart Network Data Services
This is actually one of the better programs that I have seen in a while that allows an ESP to better monitor email delivery and what is junked. All ISPs should look at providing these tools as it not only helps with delivery monitoriing, but also helps with the spoofing of domains we see so often.
Optimal Day of Week for Emailing Now Tough to Choose
An eROI study of emails sent, read and clicked on shows that the market has finally evened out into a sort of stasis where the number of emails sent out on a particular day of the week is only that which won’t overload the reading rate. This has also reduced the volatility of click rates from day to day. The image at left shows this relatively fluid trend of emails sent. A contrasting graph showing fairly large discontinuities from a year ago can be seen in the jump.
Microsoft launched tools and services yesterday to help ISPs fight spam and phishing, in what was good news for email marketers, DM News reports. Microsoft introduced a preview of Smart Network Data Services, a tool designed to help ISPs fight spam by providing them with information on the volume of email being sent from the ISP to MSN Hotmail and what percentage of that email has been marked as spam.
ISPs can then clean compromised machines, increase security measures for the host or network, and work with the party that sent the message to determine whether it is spam or legitimate email.
Microsoft also announced its MSN Postmaster site to help bulk emailers, ISPs and others to better understand issues regarding emails sent to Hotmail accounts. Postmaster helps fight junk email, improve delivery of legitimate bulk emails, streamline the reporting of email abuse and assist with troubleshooting, according to MSN.
A common email marketing misconception is email is filtered because it contains words such as “free” in the subject line or body. By itself, that won’t get your email filtered. Though certain content combinations may get a message filtered, ISPs may be trapping your legitimate email for infractions you rarely pay attention to.
Take HTML code. Using outdated or incorrect code is a major reason why email to domains such as MSN/Hotmail and AOL are blocked or delivered to bulk or junk mail folders.
You may think you don’t have to worry about this. Your email may render correctly and look just fine to you. Wrong! Pivotal Veracity, a delivery-monitoring service provider, estimates nearly 100 percent of all HTML email doesn’t comply with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards.
Because each ISP handles email differently, messages that get past the filters at one destination may be filtered or entirely blocked at another. Why are some ISPs so concerned about HTML code? You can thank spammers, of course. HTML syntax and format errors are common tricks spammers use to foil standard content filters.
Some W3C infractions are minor and won’t cause email to be filtered. An example is not using “alt” tags, which describe the content in an image tag. Many other innocuous-appearing coding errors or tricks may send your email straight to the bulk folder.
Use the Force Luke….
The good news is that I am paying for this disruption in my business. Why is this good news? Because I can call up the company and complain and look for an alternative system that works. For those in the business of e-mail marketing, that is not the case. With the increasing power of vigilante domain blocking and blacklisting services, companies are finding their legitimate e-mail being blocked by ISPs who subscribe to these services.
A good example of this occurred a few weeks ago when I was unable to send an e-mail to one of my employees who used Road Runner as her ISP. We were blocked. Why? According to our ISP, it was because of a single spammer using a Yahoo! e-mail address. In order to block the spammer, Road Runner apparently added hundreds of IP address to their blacklist, including ours. As a result, I was not able to conduct business properly because someone unconnected to my company or me was able to prevent my ability to communicate with my own employees. Our ISP was working with Road Runner to get us unblocked, but why should they have to?
Congress is once again taking up Can-Spam and is accepting suggestions on ways to improve the law. Here is something I’d like to see enacted: Make it illegal to block e-mail messages. In the black hat/white hat war on spam, we’ve seen the Jedi Knights of the anti-spam world turn into Darth Vader.
On the surface, wine doesn’t lend itself well to online purchase.
“Say you’re going to have a dinner party in a couple of weeks,” explains wine e-marketing specialist Jeremy Benson, President Benson Marketing.
“It’s not like you’re going to say, ‘Hey, I should go online and see what wine I should purchase.’ You’re probably going to buy retail.”
But wineries with a house email list and a strong brand are successfully convincing even the most offline-disposed consumer to purchase online. In fact, Benson says up to 80% of wine sold on winery Web sites is sparked by email newsletters and offers to house lists.
The spam battle is escalating: As ISPs get better at identifying and blocking unsolicited email messages, spammers are trying harder to make it past filters. One of the ways they get around filters is by making their unsolicited spam look like your “ham” (legitimate email). Your mail gets blocked because, in one way or another, your mail looks like spam to the ISPs of the recipients you’re trying to reach.
How can you ensure your legitimate mail isn’t mistaken for spam? You probably already know that certain words, however innocuous, can be suspect when found in the subject line of an email message (think “hammer” or “teen”).
But what you might not know is that many ISPs may be blocking your mail before they even see the subject line. Why? Because they can’t be sure that you are who you say you are.
Helping ISPs verify your identity, therefore, is a crucial part of ensuring that your email messages make it to the recipient’s inbox. Your email can get past this first delivery hurdle if you (1) have a static IP address, (2) have both forward and reverse DNS set up for your domain name, and (3) have an SPF record.
Every e-mail marketer receives spam complaints. It doesn’t matter if you use confirmed opt-in or have never seen a complaint in your life. Your messages do get complaints. Unless you use an e-mail service provider (ESP) or your ESP doesn’t provide these services, you might not have immediate access to these complaints.
Spam complaints are a useful metric for two reasons. First, they indicate how closely you follow best practices. Second, ISPs and anti-spam services use them to filter and even to block messages. Today, a look at where complaints generate, how they’re used, and what you can do to minimize them.
How Users Report Spam
There are three primary ways e-mail recipients can file complaints:
Most large consumer ISPs include a link or button that allows recipients to flag spam messages:
ISP Report Spam Button Feedback Loop
AOL Yes Yes
Yahoo! Yes No
Hotmail Yes No
EarthLink Yes No
NetZero Yes Yes
Juno Yes Yes
E-mail blacklist operators turn the Internet into a gated community
So you have signed up for some newsletters of areas of interest, electronics and home furnishings, deals on items you are watching at an auction, etc, and you expect to get those emails when they are ready to be sent to you…. Well you should start to think twice. Although most email marketers and email marketing service providers are working dilegently to get you the information you request, there are other powers at work. ISPs and filters.
We have ALL been bombarded with spam over and over again and are coming to accpet it as a part of email service. There is no true running from it not matter what spam filters. I want stress that good email marketers are not trying to spam. It is the those bad folks, or the one that emailed me yesterday asking “I want to email as many people as possible that have never heard of us, can you help me?”, that are causing these issues.
Listen, ISPs, we are not the problem, we are the answer, we the bouncers to your back tie party. Please make sure to tip the bouncers and trust them to do thier jobs.
New Policy from MSN.com. Passport and Hotmail
A new change from MSN (the leader in the war on spam) basically gives you no other option instead of getting email from Microsoft. Not a real “opt in” but a “if you want to use Hotmail or Msn.com mail, you will be required to get email from us.
“I am consenting to receive all information from Microsoft in electronic form only. I also agree to receive targeted advertisements and periodic member letter e-mail messages from MSN. I understand that if I do not accept the Agreements in their entirety without modification, I should click the Cancel button to discontinue sign-up.”
Interesting approcach Bill. Not quite the same approach you are using on the email service providers and companies out there.
Read the Terms.
Well hotmail, yahoo, gmail and now AOL’s Aim.com mail. Ad supported email clients. Perfect. At least this is just another version of AOL… or will there be some differences that we need to start bracing for like image suppression etc.
We will keep you posted.
Almost one million net addresses owned by UK cable firm Telewest have been blacklisted by an anti-spam group.
The Spam Prevention Early Warning System blacklisted the addresses because many of the machines using them have been hijacked by spammers.
The army of remotely-controllable machines have probably been recruited by viruses and worms.
Telewest said it knew about the problem and was working with customers to regain control of their home computers.
In checking my gmail account today I noticed a new feature. As a default at launch, they suppressed all images, and thus tracking pixels, in the mail client. Well this is the first time I have seen a new “Always display images from this sender (insert email address here).
This isn’t a coup, but it is a great progesssion for email marketers. Think of it as a TRUSTED SENDER feature in gmail that allows an end user to always display your images, thus making the emails trackable through your ESP.
You might want to look at including a special note in your emails, using dymanic content and placeholders to insert a message to them letting them know that they can now always get your HTML emails as you intended them to be delivered.
Some 67% of respondents found spam annoying, compared to 77% last year, according to Pew Internet & American Life Project survey.
Faced with a growing amount of spam, E-mail users have resigned themselves to the torrent of unsolicited commercial messages. A new report from the non-profit Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that even as spam volume continues to increase, E-mail users mind it less.
The report, based on a nationwide phone survey of 1,421 Internet users between Jan. 13 and Feb. 9, suggests that the amount of spam reaching inboxes continues to rise despite some claims to the contrary. Among those with personal E-mail accounts, 28% say they are receiving more spam than a year ago, while 22% say they’re receiving less. Among those with E-mail accounts at work, 21% report more spam, and 16% report less.
E-MAIL MARKETERS WOULD HAVE BETTER luck if they employed behavioral targeting techniques in their messaging campaigns, according to a recent Jupiter Research study on promotional messaging. The report, “Promotional E-Mail: Driving Sales Through Behavioral Targeting,” suggests that marketers should target consumers based on factors such as Web pages viewed, time spent per page, and shopping cart abandonment.
“The vast majority of marketers are missing the opportunity to improve campaign relevance by targeting engaged subscribers,” stated the report.
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