The Email Wars

So this AM I got a nice email from Microsoft, loaded with all the spam stats they could fit in an email. With the AM announcment of the purchase of an anti spam company and the Sedner ID buzz, seems that they are charging ahead to squash all threats.

Was this due to the viral email from Bill Gates promising us millions? Is he that pissed?

We applaud the work that Microsoft is doing to lead this cart with a stick and not a carrot, but they really need to open up some channels to talk to more partners in the space and not heavy hand.

Read the Email below.

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I mean maybe we are approaching this whole CanSpam /Sender ID thing with the wrong methods. Maybe we should follow in the footsteps of the Russian who just kill spammers. Do you think that would get the message across and end this spam problem?

I kind of think it would.

Russia’s Biggest Spammer Brutally Murdered in Apartment

Vardan Kushnir, notorious for sending spam to each and every citizen of Russia who appeared to have an e-mail, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head.

Kushnir, 35, headed the English learning centers the Center for American English, the New York English Centre and the Centre for Spoken English, all known to have aggressive Internet advertising policies in which millions of e-mails were sent every day.

In the past angry Internet users have targeted the American English centre by publishing the Center’s telephone numbers anywhere on the Web to provoke telephone calls. The Center’s telephone was advertised as a contact number for cheap sex services, or bargain real estate sales.

Another attack involved hundreds of people making phone calls to the American English Center and sending it numerous e-mails back, but Vardan Kushnir remained sure of his right to spam, saying it was what e-mails were for.

Under Russian law, spamming is not considered illegal, although lawmakers are working on legal projects that could protect Russian Internet users like they do in Europe and the U.S.

Major General Bill Nussey spent some time with iMedia talking about the state of the industry. He covers the maturation of email marketing, deliverability, and the moral of the troops in the trenches.

Read the MG’s Notes

A GREAT short article from Matt. Wonderfully written and enough to help most understand why we all need to embrace authentication. You go Matt.

E-mail Authentication

BY NOW EVERY MARKETER HAS learned that Internet service providers (ISPs) take e-mail authentication quite seriously — with Microsoft leading the charge with Sender ID. Microsoft is using a stick, not a carrot, to make e-mail senders get on the authentication band wagon. E-mailers who do not publish a proper sender ID record are now going to find themselves in the bulk mail folder at Hotmail and MSN, as well as have a big fat disclaimer thrown on top of their e-mails from Microsoft warning users that the source of the e-mail can’t be authenticated.

I’m a big fan of authentication. Here are some positive aspects of authentication:

- It WILL make a big dent in spoofing, phishing, and fraud, right away. Why? Because those particular elements of the ‘Internet Axis of Evil’ are identity-based. Therefore, identity authentication will either stop those things, make it easier for consumers to steer clear of them, or make it easier for law enforcement to go after them.

- It WILL NOT make a big dent in spam right away. Why? Because spam is much more nuanced than fraud. If I’m Microsoft, and I know that you are the particular sender of an e-mail into my network, that’s all good and well. But I might not have any idea if I want to accept that mail. Another way of saying this: Spammers can publish sender ID records too.

- It WILL lay the foundation for longer-term spam solutions. Why? Because it is important to understand exactly who is sending mail into a network in order to answer that next question of “do I want to accept your mail?”

Authentication is the precursor for both reputation and accreditation. Once ISPs can identify who you are, they can decide whether they like you or not. Lots of factors play into this decision, including complaint rates, identity stability, unknown user volume, security practices, unsubscribe policies and more.

When it comes to reaching the e-mail inbox, one thing is clear: It is not automatic, nor is it an easy path. Vigilance is required by all e-mail senders to make sure they are keeping up with the technologies and best practices necessary to keep their customers happy — and avoid negative perceptions by e-mail receivers making filtering decisions.

I mean so it seems from this report that we are all directly responsible for why spam works. I mean come on for all of those that are complaining, filing reports, creating hell for the legit companies, there are those that are actually converting in a sale? What the hell.

People, if you don’t like spam and want to end it, stop opening it and at the least, stop buying from it. This is truly a disturbing study.

Why Spam Works

It’s always been a perplexing question. Why — when everyone purports to hate spam so much — does so much of it keep piling up in our e-mail inboxes?

A study done by the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland found that on average Americans receive nearly 20 spam messages a day.

No one wants spam. In fact, they are willing to pay handsomely to avoid it. IDC projects that anti-spam product and service revenues will climb close to $2 billion by 2008.

Yet the spam keeps coming. Why?

According to a new survey of nearly 800 end users, comprising 34% corporate business users and 66% consumers, by Mirapoint and the Radicati Group, the answer is simple. Many of the people who claim to hate spam are supporting the practice by buying products from spammers.

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Latest study shows some solid numbers, we are pulling ours to publish this week and I will be interested to see how they match up. One odd thing is the top10 domains they list. I would assume Yahoo and Earthlink and even Road runner, but mac.com. Very small group in total, as we are mac users ourselves, this shocked us.

Read on.

Q2 e-mail delivery rates held steady during second quarter, Lyris says

E-mail delivery rates held steady at 89% during the second quarter, with 97.1% average rate for the top ten Internet service providers, according to Lyris EmailAdvisor.

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I love that after all of the rules and regs the FTC threw around and hoops everyone needed to jump through (although it did help some), they now back Authentication. We do too. Make those that are legit marketers get into a system that can regulate them. Good for business and good for my inbox.

FTC Wants Authentication, Email Industry Responds

Not too long ago, the Federal Trade Commission was worried at the snail’s pace of authentication-standards adoption by the email industry, reports DM News. The FTC and Direct Marketing Association have viewed authentication - technologies for confirming the originators of email - as the best way to combat spam and email fraud, and both groups have opposed a national do-not-email list.
In recent months, the industry’s response has finally gained momentum.The Email Authentication Implementation Summit 2005, held this week in New York, urged widespread adoption of authentication methods, DM News writes.

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While some e-mail services have adopted SenderID, there are still many that have not. According to Cox, the other reason for the false positives is that not all users remain on a single server. “SPF says, ‘All of my mail should come from these servers,’” says Cox. For many of EarthLink’s customers, they can be legitimately on a variety of servers, such as a corporate server, and still send and receive mail using their EarthLink address. For those users, SPF fails.

EarthLink started testing DomainKeys in the first quarter of 2005 and now signs over 70% of all outgoing mail. Other companies are also testing DomainKeys. Yahoo! Mail claims to be receiving approximately 350 million inbound DomainKeys signed messages per day.

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E-Mailers Lobby FTC for Opt-Out Sunset Provision

E-mail marketers are lobbying the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to add a sunset provision to the CAN-SPAM Act that would allow e-mail addresses to be automatically removed from suppression files after five years.

Because people change e-mail addresses far more often than they do their phone number or street address, e-mail address churn is significantly higher than churn in other direct marketing channels.

Twenty-two percent of people responding to a recent survey by New York-based e-mail service provider (ESP) Bigfoot Interactive say they’ve switched e-mail accounts in the last year, or are considering switching accounts in the next 12 months.

Marketers contend as a result, within five years, hundreds of millions of e-mail addresses no longer in use by the people who opted-out of the list in question will pollute suppression files.

Under the current CAN-SPAM Act, an address owner must provide “affirmative consent” for an address to be removed from a suppression file,

In contrast, telephone numbers on the FTC’s do-not-call registry automatically expire in five years.

Read More

Zombie Networks Account for Majority of Spam in June
During June, spam sent through zombie PCs accounted for an average of 62 percent of all spam filtered by the MX Logic Threat Center. This compares with 55 percent in May and 44 percent in April.

“The continued proliferation of zombie PCs has levied a heavy cost on ISPs and email end users,” Chasin said. “Compromised PCs have resulted in millions of email users being unknowingly blacklisted, often through no fault of their own.”

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Text is the key to success? And this whole time we have been telling people it is cool images. Right.

We all know that we have about three seconds to capture the attention of the subscriber. We need to nail the subject and from line even before the open of the email. I have seen studies about using the word “free” and other spam filter words, but I can tell you that this only helps in the Shotgun approach. This is if you have massive lists that you can afford to get thrown some percentage of the time into a junk box and other times get the open. Most marketers have list from 15K to 150K on average, except the big portals, merchants and destination sites and travel sites.

Read below, as it is a great article, but know that this is not the magic pill.

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One of my favorite editors, Anne Holland, from MarketingSherpa had a great post in her newsletter today. She gave some good stats on the state of the industry from the many client, ISP and ESP sources they speak with regularly. Nice work Anne.

“Can phishing emails make people miss or deliberately delete messages they would otherwise want to receive from businesses?” Andrew Brandt, Senior Associate Editor PC World, interviewed me last week for an article he’s working on.

Three factors made me say yes:

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Email forwarding amounts to ritual gift exchange

Forwarding a quirky email or an amusing link or video attachment to colleagues may seem innocent enough, but it is the modern equivalent of ritual gift exchange and carries with it similar social implications, say US researchers.

Email forwarding is a familiar part of modern email communications, and has spawned many an internet phenomenon, the Star Wars kid, the Numa Numa dance, and Oolong the rabbit to name just a few.

Benjamin Gross at the University of Illinois, US, and colleagues studied email forwarding behaviour by conducting informal interviews among email users. He says forwarding emails plays a vital role in constructing and maintaining modern social ties, despite the phenomenon receiving scant attention from social scientists.

Forwarding a genuinely amusing or interesting link to a friend, for example, shows that you are thinking of them and are aware of the sort of content they like, Gross says. But passing an irrelevant or out-of-date link on to contacts can be annoying, thus lowering the sender’s social status in the recipient’s eyes.

“Viral” marketing

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Like Russia and the US in the 60’s the Cold War between what every individual domain owner will have to do to get an email into an inbox gets more complicated. We can’t have 15 different rules (SenderId, Domain Keys, Trusted Sender, Bonded Sender, Postini, etc) if we ever expect to even be able to get an email to our dear old mom.

“Yeah mom I sent you that thank you but it must have not gotten to you as I am not sure if my Domain Keys is still active, or was it my sender ID?” Really what is this all about. I believe in making things better for everyone, but heck let’s standardize. I don’t care if it is MS or anyone else. Let’s pick a poison and drink it together.

Yahoo!, Cisco Systems Propose Anti-Spam Technology

YAHOO! AND CISCO SYSTEMS HAVE proposed as an industry standard the anti-spam technology the two launched in early June. Dubbed DomainKeys Identified Mail, the tool which verifies the origins of e-mail messages, was the combination two related and rival tools: Yahoo!’s Domain Keys and Cisco’s Identified Internet Mail.

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Bill, we love you. This is another great article from Bill on what we need to consider as email markers and also as end consumers that subscribe to email lists.

A State of Mind
by Bill McCloskey, Wednesday, July 6, 2005

This week we have a new nominee in the Dumb Things People Do To Stop Spam awards. It is actually a tie for first place between Michigan and Utah who have both launched ill-conceived anti-spam laws, which like most nominees in this category, hurt legitimate white-hat e-mailers and reward the black hats.

Anti-spam legislation is great on the surface - it makes the lawmakers seem like they are tackling a big problem (who doesn’t hate spam?). What usually happens, however, is that because they don’t have enough expertise in the field, they end up making the problem much worse than it was originally. The so-called “Child Protection Registry” laws are an example.

Here is the basic law: The states put up a “Do Not E-mail” registry. The e-mail addresses are supposedly addresses that children have access to. Once the address is up for 30 days, marketers are prohibited from sending e-mails to those addresses that contain anything a child would be prohibited from purchasing. Marketers must match their list against the registry and pay for the privilege. Anyone caught violating the law is subject to fines. The law was designed to protect kids from gambling and porno e-mails. Who could find a problem with that! Right!

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