The Email Wars

Ads mentioning real estate tycoon Donald Trump and those hawking “Penis Patch” body enhancements were among the top 10 junk e-mails in 2005, according to America Online.

Noticeably absent? Porn.

“Porn is passe when it comes to spam,” Nicholas Graham, an AOL spokesman said.

Sexually suggestive e-mails took another tumble this year after slipping in popularity last year.

More than a half-trillion junk e-mails, known as spam, were blocked by AOL filters, slightly above 2004 levels, the company said. The number of junk e-mails reported by AOL’s 26 million members worldwide has declined about 75 percent since 2003.

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The FTC says that the CAN SPAM act is starting to show some legs. Looks like they are seeing a leveling off in spam. Tell that to some of our honeypots that continue to collect junk at high rates every day. We hope that this means that legitimate opt in marketers are starting to truly march to best practices and laws. Join us for an upcoming Webinar in January on Opt in Best Practices.

Visit www.eroi.com/webinar.htm to sign up for an alert. Opt in of course.

About 70 percent of the world’s e-mail messages continue to be spam. But the number is leveling off, which federal officials on Tuesday cited as evidence that a law enacted two years ago is working.

At a press conference here, the Federal Trade Commission released a report (click here for PDF), delivered last week to Congress, that said the so-called Can-Spam Act is “effective in providing protection for consumers.”

Can-Spam has permitted the agency to pursue lawsuits against spammers and has spurred adoption of commercial e-mail “best practices,” such as including an “opt out” link and the sender’s postal address in any unsolicited message, said Lydia Parnes, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

What remains unclear, however, is how effective the law has been. Statistics compiled by antispam companies show that the total number of junk e-mail messages has leaped 62 percent in the last year.

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Florida’s attorney general has spearheaded an aggressive campaign against unsolicited e-mails, or spam. But as a candidate for governor, he appears to be generating some unwanted Internet clutter himself.

Charlie Crist was a staunch defender of a tough antispam law passed by the state legislature last year, under which violators can be fined up to $500 for every e-mail they send.

But a report in Thursday’s St. Petersburg Times said that Crist, a Republican gubernatorial candidate, had annoyed some residents of the state by sending them unwanted e-mails promoting his candidacy and soliciting campaign donations.

Joe Spooner, a 41-year-old investment adviser, told the newspaper he had no idea how the Crist campaign got his e-mail address but repeatedly tried to unsubscribe.

After his fifth request to be removed, Spooner sent the Crist campaign an e-mail of his own. He accused Crist of hypocrisy because of the way he seemed to have forgotten all about his vocal crackdown on spammers.

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The bad work of the few impact the many.

Unfortunately all of the crap that gets sent out impacts not only a marketer’s delivery, inbox perceptions as well as the time we spend with ISPs trying to get it resolved.

Malware Threats Up 48 Percent in 2005

Threats from malware (viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware and the like) have increased 48 percent - from 10,724 in 2004 to 15,907 new ones this year - according to the annual Sophos Security Threat Management Report, writes TechNewsWorld/E-Commerce Times. The report also found that one in every 44 emails carries a virus; new Trojans are being minted faster than Windows worms at a rate of almost two to one; pill and miracle elixirs top the spam charts, but porn and stock scams are surging; and cyber-criminals are coming together and combining their technologies to attack their victims.

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From an article on MSN

Commentary–In the world of IT, e-mail is treated a lot like electricity. We want it to work and not have to worry.

But e-mail’s functionality has been devalued by unrelenting abuse in the form of spam, viruses and phishing. We’ve even reached the point where one must ask whether fed-up users are ready to declare “lights out” on e-mail.

When scammers first began to proliferate on the Internet, e-mail users were often tricked by fraudulent e-mail. The infamous PayPal and Citibank spoofs, among others, shook up the online world. However, we are now seeing a reversal: E-mail users are increasingly citing “good” e-mails as fraudulent, indicating that they are even more skeptical about legitimate e-mail.

In fact, there has been a notable shift in e-mail user perspectives as revealed in the (http://survey.mailfrontier.com/survey/quiztest.html) MailFrontier Phishing IQ Test. The Phishing IQ Test, taken by more than 500,000 individuals to date, tests users’ ability to identify a series of e-mail samples as either fraudulent or legitimate.

Respondents nowadays correctly identify phishing e-mails 82 percent of the time. But they correctly identify legitimate e-mails only 52 percent of the time. These findings suggest that e-mail users may be getting better at discovering phishing scam attempts but are even more skeptical about legitimate e-mail.

Additional data supports this development. Research and analyst firm Gartner released a report in June, in which more than 80 percent of U.S. online consumers said their concerns about online attacks have affected their trust in e-mail from companies or individuals they don’t know personally. Of these consumers, more than 85 percent delete suspect e-mail without opening it.

It is clear: E-mail is at a tipping point. If e-mail skepticism remains unabated, it will have a significant impact on online transactions and communications. Banks are seeing this skepticism impact online banking, and retailers are seeing

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Not that I like to Pimp the competition, but I love the direction of the new Bronto industry tracking tool. A great resource for marketers. The one thing that bothers me about it is that they only have a few hundred clients they are tracking and many of them are not major players in the space. I need some Fortune 100 clients to see what they are doing as well as they have the money and are thought leaders.

But do check out the tool and use it as a guide. Also look at the client list so that you are comparing apples to apples.

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From eMarketer.com

Why do online retailers, who should know all about online marketing, have the lowest e-mail open rates?

The Bronto “Internet Statistics Report,” drawn from a sample size of over 20 million e-mails sent during the three month period ending November 20, 2005, showed that on average marketers realized 95.5% e-mail delivery rates, 24.2% open rates and 5.0% click-through rates.

But there were large differences between industries.

Published: December 09, 2005
(After January 08, 2006, this article will only be available to eStat Database subscribers.)

The new email version includes a spell-check tool; security features that rate incoming messages as “known sender,” “unknown sender” or “unsafe”; a faster full-text email search engine; and in-box and contact list scroll feature to view more messages and entries.

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As an ESP (email service provider) sometimes delivery is out of our control. Here is a good example that could delay the delivery of your email campaign.

The pesky Sober worm is to blame for disrupting e-mail traffic between Comcast account holders and users of Microsoft-based e-mail, Redmond said on Friday.

A variant of Sober known as Win32/Sober.Z@mm is pummeling servers at Hotmail and MSN with “unusually high mail load,” causing delays in e-mail delivery to Hotmail and MSN customers, said Brooke Richardson, MSN’s lead product manager. Richardson also indicated that Internet service providers besides Comcast may be having problems directing e-mail to Hotmail and MSN servers.

“We are working with Comcast and other ISPs to address (the) issues,” Richardson said. “We’re actively working to take the appropriate steps to remedy the situation as rapidly as possible. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.”

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From Mediapost by Lynn Russo
IMAGINE IF E-MAIL SPAM DIDN’T exist anymore. Minus the clutter, more legitimate e-mail would get delivered. Consumers would more readily welcome, read, and respond to relevant e-mail from companies they trusted. And that, in turn, would fuel more use of targeted e-mail as a customer communication tool.

That’s the goal of e-mail service providers (ESPS), Internet service providers (ISPS), and marketers, who are adopting two new types of e-mail delivery protocol standards, authentication tags and accreditation, which results in a “reputation” score very similar to a credit score. Microsoft, Yahoo!, Bigfoot Interactive, DoubleClick, the Direct Marketing Association, the E-mail Service Provider Coalition, and Visa have already gotten behind the initiatives. “Major e-mailers continue to struggle with the problems of deliverability,” says Trevor Hughes, executive director of the E-mail Service Provider Coalition. “Even with messages you have permission to send, about 20 percent of them are not making it to the inbox.” On the e-commerce side, Hughes says: “Some stats…suggest that 1 in 5 transactional messages are not getting delivered, either. That’s a real incentive for folks to do whatever they can to move those numbers.”

Here’s an even bigger incentive: Non-participation isn’t an option. Compliance with the new standards will determine whether or not a company will be able to use e-mail marketing as an effective tool at all.

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A recent interview with Ryan Buchanan, CEO
eROI Inc.

Marketers continue to be challenged by e-mail deliverability hurdles; this is nothing new. But why do marketers continue to put up with these hurdles? E-mail, fortunately or not, is now part of our everyday fabric, so we keep putting up with the challenges it brings and hope one day the problems just magically disappear.

No such luck, they just keep evolving. Companies and the marketers that work for them increasingly recognize the need to understand and deal with deliverability issues. Smart companies are fighting back with knowledge and best practices and working with best e-marketing experts and partners.

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