The Email Wars

MAWWG released some new best practices for ISPs and ESPs to take a look at in June. I have been meaning to share this if you have not read it already. Worth taking a read if you have not seen it yet from the ISP and ESP side of the businesses. Email Marketers might not find too much in this release. 

Globally-Developed MAAWG Best Practices for Dynamic Address Sharing, Email Forwarding Now Available; Aimed at Botnets, Improving User Experience

Network operators and ISPs from around the world have cooperated on two new best practice papers addressing technical issues that will help block botnet-induced spam and improve the deliverability of consumers’ personal emails. The recommendations for sharing IP address space and for email forwarding were approved at a Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) meeting in Heidelberg, Germany last week and are available today.

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Let’s think about this expose in the NYT last week about Goodmail. Now I could agree with them in some ways, but rather if someone has a program that 1. qualifies for Goodmail and 2. Wants to pay for delivery then why is there a problem with it? Truly if the individual has opted in for your email programs you should be able to make sure that it is going to get to the inbox. If this means using a pay for delivery system (now it does not work at all ISPs as of now) then go for it. 

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Do you have some questions for the omnipitent ruler of Yahoo Mail? Well here is your chance. You have a 4-5pm Window on the 30th to fire off your questions to Mark. I will be on the beach about that time just thinking about not working… again. (It is a repetitive process to take me away from work and like any good 12 step program takes repeating things to yourself). 

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How many amazing things have we seen over the years made from junk mail? We saw the shredder that automatically prints then shreds spam/junk mail. We saw SpamObituraries where a writer uses the sender FROM to write the Obit of the person. And we now have this art. I actually love it and it was shared with me from Tricia Pridemore. (Thanks!)

I have actually made one of these my background on my laptop today. Makes me laugh as they are good.

If you are anywhere like me, I love to check out the junk as much as the good stuff. Seeing how they bait people in with the From Lines, the subject line and the fact that you might actually trust this kills me.

Google has revamped the contacts section of Gmail to let users decide who’s on their A-list.

Gmail adds a contact entry for every e-mail you use, and previously showed either the full list or the “Most Contacted” subset Google chose. Now the service divides contacts into a “My Contacts” list that users can define and a “Suggested Contacts” list with everyone else.

What does this mean for email marketers? Well my initial take on this is that it should help with deliverability by automatically placing your email address for your campaigns into the address book of your subscribers… making you a trusted sender in some ways. There might be some ways in which this is going to help, but it is a little early to know the full impact.

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Blog post from Fred Wilson - Union Square Ventures.

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/07/are-your-invite.html

I think this is interesting because Twitter is such a hot Web 2.0 company these days, and yet they’re facing the same issues that many other companies face, making sure that their emails get delivered to consumers’ inboxes.

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In a similar fashion to the Auditing The Opt In post, you need to always be checking that your opt out process is working. People make changes to code on your site(s) that can impact this flow.

Make sure to test the the footers or any links in your emails monthly.

Check that the opt out is processing immediately in your email ESP or CRM system AND any outside systems that you are using like Salesforce or MS CRM.

If you are syncing it with your ecom system make sure that they opt out is recorded there as well for marketing emails and that transactional emails are still working.

If you have a page on your site that allows to update or change your email profile, make sure that form/system is feeding the same data as the opt out.

The big red flag to me is to always look at any 3rd party data you are using and make sure to wash your internal database against it so that you are not emailing those that have opted out. I have seen my fair share of 3rd parties that email me and do not make this a solid practice.

Now I know that this is a morbid post title, but as I was driving today I had a thought pop into my head, What the heck happens to your email accounts when you die? Has anyone ever talked about this? Does your next of kin contact all the ISPs that you have email accounts with and deactivate them? Do they just live on getting more and more email? Does anyone know?

Consider this in the fact of your email list churn or non respondents. Have you ever once considered the fact that maybe the fact that they have stopped reading your email is that they have died? I can tell you I had never considered this as something to think about before this past week. How do you know? Do you send out an email with a subject line “Alive or Dead? Please confirm?”. That might be one way of taking a whack at this issue, but as we are growing the upward online demographic more and more each week, month and year we might need to start considering this in our inactive files. 

What this bodes well for is list hygiene and keeping your list in order. So many people have “dirty” lists where they are not taking the actions to cull or move non active emails to another list. They simply continue to mail to them come hell (no pun intended) or high water. So what are you doing? Are you keeping on top of your list and working on segmenting addresses based on inactivity? I hope so as unless their next of kin took a liking the the email address they had or got access to it, you are simply mailing into the ether.

Very excited to see Campaign Monitor continue to share with the email marketing community. Our designers love them for the help that they provide to the design community.

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In the last year, we’ve seen some changes in the email client market. Webmail usage continues to grow significantly while new versions of popular desktop clients have been released. In an attempt to stimulate some improvement on the CSS front, we’ve helped launch the Email Standards Project.

While we can hope for future improvements, it’s the present we need to design for. The time has arrived to again poke and prod the major email clients to determine just how much (or how little) support they provide for using CSS with HTML emails.

Last year’s report focused on the unique challenges of Outlook 2007. In 2008, Outlook is still an issue, but there are encouraging signs in other areas.

The release of Entourage 2008 (the Mac equivalent of Outlook) made great improvements with CSS support, bringing it on par with Apple Mail’s excellent rendering. Proof that perhaps Microsoft has been listening and we can only hope that the next version of Outlook will follow suit.

Get the PDF of the CSS Chart for email clients at the link below.
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/

Security flaw turns Gmail into open-relay server… so does this mean that they should be blacklisted? How does an issue like this when it comes from an ISP deserve to be treated by other ISPs? Do they give a courtesy to one another when this happens? I know that if it happens to a corporate mail server it gets slammed and blocked faster than me accepting and Irish Car Bomb drink on St. Pats. AND that is fast.

Security flaw turns Gmail into open-relay server A newfound flaw in Google’s Gmail allows would-be spammers to treat the service as an open-relay server. Compounding the issue is the fact that services such as Hotmail and Yahoo “trust” Gmail. This may facilitate e-mail delivery, but it also makes it easier for spammers to reach their intended targets.

Read the Full Story

Over on the Yahoo Mail Blog they stated they have been doing work on Yahoo Mail classic, and of course, anytime they do work, there are bugs.

http://www.ymailblog.com/blog/2008/04/24/update-to-yahoo-mail-classic-has-resumed/

The postmaster and development teams at Yahoo have been using the blog to communicate changes, and actively read comments from users. If you are experiencing problems, it is a good place to post or read comments from other users to see if they are already aware of the issues.

Comments from the WEB on this:

Someone was asking about problems with Yahoo yesterday. I use Yahoo Classic for my personal emails and I noticed yesterday and today that it’s making emails that I haven’t opened as read. If I mark those as unread, it then marks other unread emails as read. So perhaps there’s not a deliverability issue but one with open and click rates because subscribers are not reading messages because Yahoo is telling them that they’ve already looked at the emails. Anyone else seeing this?
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I’m seeing similar problems in the new version of Yahoo Mail. Over the past week, in my personal account:

Previously read & deleted emails have returned to my inbox as unread
The inbox has failed to load & generated JavaScript errors
Individual messages have been failing to load, generating internal Yahoo error messages to try again

It seems as if they may be doing some behind-the-scenes work that’s negatively impacting the user experience–and, in some cases, making select messages unreadable for a period of time.

From Ken Magill on DM News. Worth the read. Will the state by state insanity ever stop? Can’t they involve the marketers, ISPs and ESPs when they go to create a new bill? We all want it to stop, as it would only benefit our double opt in, above board clients.

Not Again: Anti-Spam Bill Being Crafted in CA
A bill is working its way through the California legislature that supporters contend would strengthen its anti-spam laws and could go in to effect as early as this fall, the San Francisco Chronicle reported last week.

Why is it that so many anti-spam activists refuse to understand that spammers are generally breaking about 142 laws every time they hit “send” already, and that a 143rd magical piece of legislation will do nothing to fix the problem that can’t already be accomplished with existing law?

Click here to read about another misguided effort at trying to legislate spam out of existence.

Great article from Stefan in an easy to digest list of FOUR key things. I know we marketers love our numbered lists…

In this article, Stefan Pollard explains how to make your email campaigns mobile-friendly:

1. Reformat text
You should always offer a text option as an alternative to HTML for all readers. You can send this version to your mobile readers, but you might also have to reformat it to make it show up better on the smaller screen.

Most text messages have 60 to 80 characters per line. Mobile platforms will show 20 to 40 characters in 12 to 15 lines per screen, depending on screen width and type style.

Desktop-friendly line lengths can create long paragraphs in the mobile reader. If you use typographic devices as copy separators that also run 60 characters, for example, you’ll give up four to five lines on the screen for something that adds no value.

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Email knits together everyone on the web, and yet there are some things missing from it that can be very useful in a business setting. Verifiable delivery, for example: how do you prove that someone got an email when you said they did? RPost has an answer to that: install their add-in, and their servers will optionally provide signed, verifiable proof of delivery for any email you send with notice to their “registered” service.

They’ve recently added another feature, which could also be useful in business settings: the “SideNote”, which lets you put a little sticky note on emails that is only visible to cc: and bcc: recipients. That’s a nice touch to let recipients know why they got copied on this mail. Pricing starts at 59 cents per unit of use. Unfortunately, at the moment the client side software is Outlook-only.

http://www.rpost.com/site/registered/registered_core.htm

Buying Remanant email at yahoo/msn etc? Have you ever heard about this? I heard this topic from an email marketing person that said that they do this every once in a while for clients through MSN and Yahoo. What this immediately made me think about is:

Does it have an impact on delivery? Does this help with getting more email from your brand into the inbox through these ISPs and help on your reputation with the links, domains and sender from lines you use?

Does it help protect feedback loops if timed with house lists? Why I thought of this was if I was dropping a massive double opt in confirmed campaign for a client from their house list, would there be an impact in delivery scores IF I had a timed drop with in house ISP remanent emails? I would think that in the grand scheme feedback, unsubs and other scores would be better balanced if I was doing this?

Is this a trick? Is is a way to leverage the ISPs to deliver 3rd party emails on your brand’s behalf? Seems a little fishy to me? But then this is the first time I have heard of doing this?

Anyone have any experience with this practice?