The Email Wars

So what happens when another ISP blocks all emails from another. This past week it looks like Comcast did just that for all MSN.com and hotmail.com users. So sorry mom if you tried to email me, Comcast thinks you are a spammer just because you are guilty by association.

I think this is more of an ISP war than we are all led to think. With spammers using fake ISP email accounts or sending volumes off of free email ISP account, it sure would be easy to fire and scoot.
From: Tom Sanders in California, vnunet.com

US ISP blocks Hotmail emails
Undelivered messages threatened to cripple entire email service

Broadband internet service provider Comcast temporarily prevented its subscribers from sending emails to Hotmail and MSN accounts.

For three days, users trying to send messages to the Microsoft owned internet service received error messages stating: “The message could not be sent because one of the recipients was rejected by the server.

Read the Article

A great article on best practices in email marketing. Read Wendy’s article. Well worth your time.

Six Steps for Email Optimization

Even if your customers have opted in, ISPs may be blocking your emails: contributor Wendy Roth helps you break through.

Your customers want your email; otherwise, they wouldn’t have signed up to receive it in the first place. So what can you do when your permission-based emails are being blocked by an ISP? How can you persuade them to let it through?

Don’t panic! Blocks happen to the best and most reputable organizations. Here are six steps to get your email delivered again.

Read Wendy’s Article

Here is the first Taste. Can’t wait to see what it does to spam, whitelists and email.

Login in today to check for delivery for a client campaign to MSN as a whitelisted sender, and invite popped up to move to Beta. Well I can’t turn that one down, even with the note:
Will be able to see all my old mail if I participate in this beta?
All of your mail will remain on our servers during the Mail Beta program. While we do not anticipate issues, due to the test environment, we cannot guarantee that all mail will be viewable through the beta.

And it ONLY works on IE 6.0 and above. So much for checking my mail on my Mac as well.

The Announcement:

See the Full Size View

It Reads:
Check out Mail Beta.
Then tell us how to make it better.

We figure that as a Hotmail user, you know as much as anyone about how an e-mail service should work. That’s why we want you to check out Mail Beta, a new version of the service that we’re working on. If you accept, you will be among the first to see some very cool new features, and you can tell us exactly what you think of them: what you love, what you hate, and what you’d rather see.

More about what Mail Beta can do for you:

Reading Pane See a preview of each message (just like Microsoft Outlook), and cruise from e-mail to e-mail without reloading a new page each time. One click shows you a message’s full contents.

Info Bar The Info Bar is a new weapon to help you zap junk and “phishing” e-mail off the face of the earth. (”Phishing” is when someone is trying to fool you into giving up your personal info with an official-looking message).

Address AutoComplete Start typing a name and “pow!” up pops a list of possible recipients from your contact list. Click on the one you want and you’re done.

Expanded Storage Your Mail Beta inbox will have 2GB (2 gigabytes) of storage. That’s a lot. Enough for 1,000 photos of 2 MB (megabytes) each, for example.

I mean who hasn’t got the Nnigerian email scam. And if we are really going to go after the bad guys, why not stop in an under developed country that really has a major effect on us?

Nigeria enlists Microsoft to fight spam scammers

Microsoft is planning to work with the Nigerian government to help track down and prosecute criminals involved in e-mail scams and other Internet-based fraud originating from the African country.

Microsoft will provide technical expertise, training and other security resources to Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), which is tasked with fighting cybercrime in the country.

Nigeria was initially slow to respond to the problem of “419″ e-mail scammers operating in the country, who were duping unsuspecting Internet users out of thousands of pounds by promising a share of the secret multimillion-pound fortune of a deposed African dictator.

Read Article

Looks like the State of Mass is going after a Russian Spam ring. I love the fact that the US is still the leader in spam according to a recent Sophos report, but we turn the cameras on those outside our borders. Go get em Yankees.

Massachusetts Hits “Internet Spam Gang” With $37 Million Fine Oct. 13, 2005 - from Information Week
To collect, the state’s Attorney General is looking for Leo Kuveyev, the leader of the spam ring, who’s believed to be in Russia.

The Office of the Massachusetts Attorney General is looking for Leo Kuveyev, the leader of the “Internet Spam Gang,” whose illegal spam operation was fined $37 million by a Boston judge this week.

“We believe he is in Russia,” said assistant attorney general Scott Schafer Thursday. “He continuously moves around.”

Kuvayev and six other persons with Massachusetts ties were named in a suit brought by Attorney General Tom Reilly in May and the court decision came down this week. Schafer, who is an assistant attorney general in the state’s consumer protection and antitrust division, said civil and not criminal charges were brought against Kuvayev so his operation could be quickly shut down.

Read Article

Seems that spam emails sent from the US have declined dramatically based on a new study from Sophos. While the US overall volume as declined, most of the slack is being taken over by China and Korea. Thanks Guys for picking up the slack. I would have preferred to get less Viagra, Porn and Mortgage spam, but at least it is not our fault this time.

And since I can’t read Asian languages, I most likely will ignore it. Ha ha.

Read more

I came across this article tonight on AdBumb. Talks about the project dubbed “HoneyPot” that is a genius idea. The team at UnSpam.com was able to set addresses across the web to monitor the harvesting of email addresses and who uses them, when they visit and what they send. Amazing.

They came up with some great stats and even better a way that can help legitimate marketers comply with the law, purge thier lists of bad emails and comply with state bodies and laws.

Learn more

I read this article on ZD Uk tonight. Seems that many of the trusted voices in the War on Spam are having mixed thoughts in regrard to the validity of SPF. Seems they feel that it is an idea that will rapidly be exploited or spoofed by real spammer. Even if it is a good idea, seems that it is ripe to be used for ill uses.

From the Article at ZDNET

Weak user authentication may be worse than none at all, claims one security expert; others are backing SPF to make a difference

User authentication for email “may be worse than useless” at preventing the spread of spam, according to Nick Fitzgerald, security consultant at Computer Virus Consulting.

“As an anti-spam measure, SPF is broken before it’s implemented, as it’s not just breakable, it’s trivial to break,” Fitzgerald told an audience at the Virus Bulletin conference in Dublin on Friday.

Read the Full Article on SPF

A new study shows that ISPs are filtering more and more based on SPF and other adhoq, constantly shifting rules that they make up. This is causing opt in email delivery rates to sink. Now if you play by the rules, it goes to show that not every email is going to be delivered. That hurts.

Hotmail, Gmail Filter Out More Permission Emails

Delivery rates for permission-based emails rose for the third straight quarter, MSN’s Hotmail and Google’s Gmail filtered out more legitimate emails, writes DM News, citing a new study from Lyris Technologies. Hotmail’s rate of “false positive filtering” increased from 5.6 percent in 2Q05 to 9.4 percent in the third quarter, and Gmail’s from 4.1 percent to 7.17 percent, according to Lyris’s quarterly Email Deliverability report, provided exclusively to DM News.

In Hotmail’s case, the issue may be its second-quarter introduction of Sender ID, which sends emails for which the sender cannot be verified to customers’ junk boxes; in Gmail’s case, the issue may be that it is new to the arena and is still finding its footing, according to a Lyris spokesperson.

Lyris found that overall inbox delivery rates are improving: 89 percent of opt-in emails were delivered by U.S. ISPs, up 4 percentage points from the second quarter. ISPs with the best delivery rates included PeoplePC, Mailblocks, Gmail, Yahoo, SBC Global and RoadRunner.

This kills me. AOL, one of the largest ISPs that hammer businesses and end users for “spamming” by placing a button called “Report this as Junk” every time a user clear out trash… has just stated that they will stop SELLING your info to others to use to email you.

Wait… I am an AOL customer and I get alot of Junk and you mean to tell me that you (AOL) have been selling my data to others to email me? Wait, I know I opted in somewhere, but let me get this straight……. you are selling my email address to companies that I do not know and do not want to get email from (as I did not opt in with them) and as a bonus, you are giving me the EMPOWERING button that let’s me rport it as JUNK? This is such an interesting thing to do…. so does AOL hammer all the emails that they sell people to use with the JUNK complaints? Are they not under the rules of the AOL Feedback loop?

It seems to me that if AOL was providing the email addresses to advertisers to email AOL subscribers and then AOL has such a massive spam problem that users complain against, why the heck would they do this? I mean no wonder people are leaving AOL in Droves and using an ISP that does not sell thier data.

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Let’s see now, you spammed people, got busted and now want to say it is dead. Well hell yes spam is a no win, dead marketing plan. Glad you caught up with that one lady. But targeted email marketing is not dead, it is actually just really maturing and taking off. Web 2.0 all the way. Glad we have cleared some of the jerks off the battle field. People like Laura are the reason you and I are lined up side by side fighting this war.

Laura Betterly, coined the “Spam Queen” in the Wall Street Journal denounces bulk e-mail as a tool for marketing.

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Great Article I read today from Melinda Krueger at Krueger Direct/Interactive. Worth the read.

Really addresses the list hygeine and steps you should take in keeping your lists clean and peforming.

I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT OF A customer list as a leaky bucket. While you are filling the bucket with fresh new customers from the faucet, old customers are dripping out the bottom. These drips can become a flow for e-mailers, since addresses change so frequently and the number of companies that consumers allow into their inboxes is so limited. Here are a few thoughts on stemming the flow.

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It is this week that the first postings on online discussion boards happened and the name SPAM was given to this problem. It marks the beginning of the war we are all part of today. If you are online, you are on a side. Some of us are on many sides, kind of like Switzerland, but we do care what the outcome is.

Where do you sit on the war? What is your role? I will define roles this week of Consumer, ISP, ESP, FTC, and Portals. As well as the most important… marketers.

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This AM, I got a subject line from one of our clients in a weekly campaign that went out that I was SURE would be a big problem. I mean if you use the words “HARD GAY” in a subject line, wouldn’t you assume it would be blocked somewhere?

This just goes to show you that words are not always the triggers when you are working off a great email platform with wonderful ISP relationships. (Self Plug) Take a look at the email and the header spam scoring below.

View spam scoring in headers

Words are a daily changing thing in the war against email. Always test subject lines and use other resources, like SpamAssasin to check the overall score of an email. Nice work Martina at Adverblog!