The Email Wars

There are always a few sides to the story. Mine, your and the truth. So all sides are weighing in on this latest action. My vote is still up for grabs. I think that it is something that will need to play out a bit before we all know what the impact will be to all of us. In the previous post you can see some estimated costs for Certified Mail. I think that these costs are legimate and many email marketers will not be able to afford this certified mail system. Whether or not this hurts opt in email marketers is out to vote at this point in time. Many large agencies are not seeing this as a hinderance but rather a benefit to the email campaigns they send out for large companies that can afford this cost to be a cost of doing business.

The EFF and MoveOn are behind this latest round of idiocy.

Here’s what leading anti-spam experts had to say about them:

Every time someone blocks MoveOn for spamming, they send out a press release that it’s a right wing political plot.
– John R. Levine, Chairman of the Anti Spam Research Group at the Internet Research Task Force

EFF posting is not a balanced story, it is a hatchet job. Cindy’s not doing any service to herself, or to the EFF, by posting that.

The EFF’s done a lot of good things. But they’re simply way wrong in their single point agenda “spam filtering is bad and is a restriction on free speech”. Especially when their two favorite examples of this restriction are a chronically open relay that keeps getting abused, and a political action site with poorly managed mailing lists.
– Suresh Ramasubramanian, Manager of antispam operations at Outblaze (~ 40 million users), Coordinator, CAUCE Asia Pacific

MoveOn has just about as much email clue as the EFF. Maybe less, if that’s possible.
I would set up an “AOL can do as they please” petition.
– Brian McNett, Forensic Spam Investigator

MoveOn has a history of sending spam. They have a history of mailing people who never asked for their mail and of not stopping when asked, and I expect that would not meet with Goodmail’s standards.
– Bill Cole, anti-spam expert

I think MoveOn have been very unreasonable and now there’s such a siege mentality vis-à-vis email issues that they don’t seem interested in listening.
– Ray Everett-Church, counsel for CAUCE, an anti-spam advocacy group

Well, I backed their original stated goal, which was to get Congress to stop trying to impeach Clinton, and that was it. When they emailed me later on with some unrelated political screed, I considered that spam, tried to unsubscribe several times, and finally marked them down as scum who figured they could email me whenever they liked because I had once supported what I thought was a limited scope issue.
– Steve Champeon, CTO, hesketh.com

Even if there are issues for concern regarding Certified Email, the MoveOn.org campaign against it is so fraught with inaccuracies and hyperbole it’s simply irresponsible behavior for a serious organization seeking to influence policy.
– Steve Ratzlaff, Senior Vice President, Greyware

I’d rather sign the “AOL is a private service, they can handle their inbound email however they want” petition.
– Al Iverson, long time anti-spam activist and deliverability manager at Digital River

To be sarcastic about it: 20,000 signed the petition, while 2,980,000 told MoveOn to stop spamming them.
– Seth Breidbart, Ph.D., creator of the Breidbart Index to measure spam.

Note: the statements above do not necessarily represent an endorsement of the CertifiedEmail service by the experts quoted.

What are your thoughts? Post your comments about the issue.

EFF To Fight E-Mail ‘Tax’

THE CIVIL LIBERTIES ORGANIZATION ELECTRONIC Frontier Foundation has assembled a disparate group of nonprofits and entrepreneurs–including Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, the Gun Owners of America, MoveOn.org Civil Action, and the Association of Cancer Online Resources–to fight America Online’s plan to charge marketers for guaranteed e-mail delivery.

The EFF says it’s afraid that any system that gives preference to paid e-mail senders will ultimately hinder the flow of information online. “AOL is selling something that they don’t really own, which is access to their users’ in-boxes,” said Danny O’Brien, activism coordinator at the EFF. The group Tuesday will announce that it intends to protest AOL’s new e-mail plan.

Read Full Article on MediaPost

Read the article on The Boston Globe site as to what mailers could anticipate to pay for this delivery service.

I want to know what puts one of the largest credit bureaus in the US outside of the law in regard to spamming people. I found this interesting artilce on the SpamKing blog today that I wanted to share with you. I find it very bothersome that Equifax is running shell companies and sending out email from Major US brands as opt in records. Really a shady pactice.

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I signed up for some emails from Buy.com to test some of the parameters of the content they would send me based on my visits and profile. What has been interesting is that they have switched some days to text from HTML. Good practice to test what works, but is was confusing to me as I signed up for HTML only. Maybe I did not click so the next time I got Text. Not sure.

But one thing I wanted to bring out was the fact they when it hits my preview window in my email client, all I see is ads. I guess it works, but I would have rather seen something better than a banner ad at first take.

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As simple as this program is that Fishbowl runs for Red Robin (text only never much in the meat of the message), they do hit the timing right. If you have a consumer audience I really think that a B day club or annual gift is a good one.

**********************************************************
Happy Burger-day from Red Robin
**********************************************************
An eClub birthday treat, just for you! Bring this in for a Gourmet Burger of your choice on us*.

But hurry, this offer expires 3/7/2006.
………………………………………………….
*Offer expires 14 days from date sent. This certificatemay only be printed and used once. Must present this coupon to your server. One coupon per table. Dine-in only. Not good with any other offers, discounts or promotions. No cash value. Any alterations to this certificate make it null and void. Certificate void if sold or auctioned. Please bring ID so we know it’s you. > Visit Us Online: http://www.redrobin.com

I was removing myself using the unsub from a newsletter that I had been watching for a while. Simple process and should have been painless. But if you see from the image below, they had the list I was on publically listed as a “Prospect” list. Not a very nice thing to show someone on you list.

The take away from this is if you are showing the lists that people are subscribed to, make the public facing name something nice. Like “Newsletter Subscribers”. On the back end of your ESP you should be able to have an internal list name or at least a DB field that allows you to segment and organize by client or prospect. I will leave the company’s name out, but take note for your own email marketing lists.

Get a guide on our site about eMarketing best practices.

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MoveOn.org is rallying the troops. Not only are they sending to their lists, but they are using a trigger to ask you to send it on again to those that you know. They even write the response you will read below that you can copy and paste to your contact list.

Dear friend,

Please ask AOL not to auction off preferential “certified” access to people’s inboxes to giant emailers, while leaving everyone else wondering if their emails are being delivered at all. AOL’s proposed pay-to-send system hurts the Internet.

America Online
Phone: (703) 265-1000
Press 0 for operator or 3 to leave a message. (If AOL transfers you to a tech support person, just let them know your concern and thank them for their time.)

Help track our impact by letting us know you called at:

http://civic.moveon.org/call

Before calling, it would be good to read the below summary of “AOL Claims & Reality” so you are prepared for what AOL may say.

After calling, please take a moment to invite your friends to sign the petition—especially those who use AOL or care about keeping the Internet free. You can just forward the sample letter that’s below.

Spreading the word is critical, but please only pass this message along to those who know you—spam hurts our campaign.

Thanks for all you do.

–The MoveOn.org Civic Action Team

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Just had to share this. It was sent to me from an employee at eROI. Looks like others are turning up the heat. Let’s see if a grass roots and not industry action fan the flames.

rom: Eli Pariser, MoveOn.org Civic Action [mailto:moveon-help@list.moveon.org]
Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2006 1:15 PM
Subject: Stop AOL’s email tax

AOL is threatening the Internet as we know it.

They want to charge an “email tax” for sending email. Those who don’t pay would risk their emails not being delivered.

Can you help change AOL’s mind by signing this emergency petition?

Dear MoveOn member,

The very existence of online civic participation and the free Internet as we know it are under attack by America Online.

AOL recently announced what amounts to an “email tax.” Under this pay-to-send system, large emailers willing to pay an “email tax” can bypass spam filters and get guaranteed access to people’s inboxes—with their messages having a preferential high-priority designation.1

Charities, small businesses, civic organizing groups, and even families with mailing lists will inevitably be left with inferior Internet service unless they are willing to pay the “email tax” to AOL. We need to stop AOL immediately so other email hosts know that following AOL’s lead would be a mistake.

Can you sign this emergency petition to America Online and forward it to your friends?

Sign here: http://civic.moveon.org/emailtax/

(more…)

A little off topic in a sense as this is a new system I saw to fight spam on blog comments and track backs. It interested me as it is cataloging email and IP addresses.

SpamPoison

WWW Robots (also called wanderers, spiders, crawlers, or bots) are programs that crawl the Web continually retrieving linked pages. When a spammer’s bot visits your website, blog, forum, etc, all pages and sites linked to it will be searched looking for email addresses.

Now you can fight back against their robots!

All you have to do is link to this page so that whenever a spammer’s robot scans your page, it will be sucked into this one.

My Favorite part might be that they are posting all of the spammers email addresses publically. I like this approach, fry them with their own tricks.

I can only tell you that every state taking on a new law is only going to hurt this from the standpoint of companies and customers getting email. We need a national standardized act, oh wait we do.. the CAN SPAM act, that keeps the rules in one place. Each new state law is creating an additional level of confusion to businesses in each of these states as well as to national companies and brands. They are creating more costs, ontop of existing costs, pay per email costs and in turn actually validating email addresses should a spammer want to clean their list. How hard is it to “sync” the list with each state and then take the ones they removed from your file and then spam the hell out of valid emails from another IP? Not a good solution in my humble opinion.

Do Not E-Mail’ Registries Percolate In Five States

NEW PROPOSALS TO ESTABLISH CONTROVERSIAL “do not e-mail” child protection registries advanced this month in three states, bringing to five the total number of states now considering such legislation–Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, and Iowa. Michigan and Utah remain the only states to have established do not e-mail registries, although Utah’s law currently faces a court challenge.
The laws generally prohibit marketers from sending material considered harmful to minors to children’s e-mail addresses. In Michigan and Utah, parents can submit their children’s e-mail addresses to a registry, and then marketers of potentially inappropriate messages pay a fee to ensure that their e-mail lists don’t contain any addresses on the registry.

Read more

I can’t say that RSS will replace email at this point in time. Although I love my RSS news Reader, I know that they are two different beasts at this point in time. We took the high road on this in December 2004 by adding RSS to our emailROI platform for our clients. We thought that it was good to be ahead of the curve. Some ESPs are adding it now and hyping it like the invent of electricity. Actually like they invented electricity. Now in educating our clients about it for over a year, only 10% have taken the plunge of checking a button in the list settings to automatically make their newsletters RSS feeds as well.

I think that at this point in time we are starting to see the consumer adoption of RSS coming to light, but still it is not going to replace email anytime soon. It is there to give people options of how they want to interact with your brand online. Now isn’t that what it is about, giving people choices? I think so. RSS is still only used by maybe at max 10% of the online population from recent reports, but I encourage you to use and ESP that does have this as an option.

WIth testing to your lists, educating them about the availability and adding to your subscription forms, newsletters and sites, you are taking the high road of being an early adopter. I know that in a year we have seen about 30-40 new RSS subscribers a day to our email newsletter, and many of these are the same people that take it as email as well. The read rates have not dropped off, nor the click throughs from the emails themselves, but the interaction has picked up on times that we are not sending a newsletter and the touch points have been extended.

My advice is for you to test RSS as an addition to your email campaigns. If not as an additonal way to fet your marketing, but try doing it for a different marketing idea, maybe a special offer newsletter that you do not offer by email. We can only test to see what your audience wants.

ClickZ has a good article today about testing emails that are personalized to the receiver. I think that this is a good idea always, but many marketers should see what they have in thier data base to target with. If you are not adding past purchases, type of client/prospect, geo location, gender, etc to your data base, I think you are behind the curve. List hygeine and data is the key to any online relationship. Make sure that you are asking for more information from time to time to create a better picture of each person. Remember that just like in the offline world, we want people to have a relationship with us and make us feel like a person with every touch, and not just a nobody.

Read the Article and See the Test Results at ClickZ

I was not sure if it was common knowledge with many of you out there, but we often see that when some clients link to sites other than their own, they run the risk of a delivery issue. This is due to some IPs or URLs being on a spam watchlist. This can have a negative impact on your email being delivered to the inbox and even impact the delivery itself.

In talking to some clients, they were unaware of this and it is a good practice to send the email to a seed list or internal and external test accounts (like Yahoo, AOL, MSN, etc) to see if you have any blocks in place with URLs you are using before sending out your campaign.

A simple tool to use as well is RBLS.org

It was funny to read that it was not only me that noticed the Spam recipes in my gmail account when I was cleaning out junk from the SPAM folder. It found it amusing, but also good that someone else noticed it too.

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See the post on the ClickZ Blog

Recently I noticed that Yahoo beta email had added an email on fire as the indicator of spam. Not that the garbage can did not tell me what to do, but lighting email on fire might give someone a better feeling about reporting it.

Many ISPs are really calling out REPORT spam in a way that should cause an emotional interaction with junk mail. At least I hope for marketers that it is only Junk mail that is lit on fire and not the messages that these subscribers actually opted into. This kiss of death is that false spam reports can have a negative affect on opt in marketing and I caution you to tread carefully about reporting spam. False reports can cause you to not receive the emails you want it too many people report false positives in the inbox.

I can only imagine that the in house Alpha for this was a small head of a spammer on fire.