The Email Wars

What happens when you have preached to people so long to add your email address to their address book so that they are a trusted sender and you now are changing that? Have you gone through this change before? It is wise to alert people prior to this change so that you do not end up in their bulk folder before you make this change. 

Marriott went above and beyond IMHO at announcing this change. Now what I loved the most was the fact that this shows that they value email as a communication channel so much that they did not even try to get a booking out of it. Nice work. Sure they had their find and reserve in the top nav, but that is a typical element in their other programs. They took the road of making sure they they did not lose people as one campaign could do more to lift their program than the long term damage in lost bookings could drive if they added more than one thing to do. 

I am not sure overall from an industry perspective of how many subscribers do take the step to add them to a “safe list” but I would bet that this had some people that had not done so before to take that step now. 

Is this something you use in your programs at the opt in? And if so do you have any data that you would share on subscribers using it? 

I am not sure what to think about this idea. I have had messages from other email marketing experts that have started to use this service already. I can understand WHY people might want to use this system, but as an email marketer my thoughts are still out to vote. 

I have set up an account for myself but do not have enough data or experience to tell you WHY to use it. Here is the coverage on it below from last week. 

What still strikes me as odd is that it was created by one of the earlier founders of an Email Service Provider.

“OtherInbox is a service that helps with one of the growing problems of using Web services: e-mail overload. More specifically, services that take your information and sell it to third parties–thus filling up your in-box with decentralized junk.

OtherInbox works by giving you a special address you can use when you sign up for things and it helps you filter them in a central location with tags and layout akin to Apple’s Mail application. Each “subscription” reads like its own in-box.

The service may be most useful for figuring out what services are selling out your e-mail address to other parties, but it’s also good for handling bacn–the messages you may want from a service, but not necessarily filling up your in-box. What makes it special is that users can effectively kill off that special address making the messages bounce back to the people who would be spamming you.”

Return Path’s Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report

Return Path recently released its  Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report. Here is George Bilbrey’s high level take on what they found:

Most of the servers sending email shouldn’t be. Only 20% of the IPs we studied were legitimate, well-configured, static email servers. It’s important to point out that this doesn’t speak at all to the quality of the messages from those servers - lots of horrible spammers know how to configure a mail server. The other 80% of the mail is coming from servers that are either identifiably bad or unidentifiable and probably bad. No wonder ISPs and other large receivers feel besieged. 

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I am not sure how many of you look at the spam emails you get, but I would wager that you all take a peek from time to time. I could be wrong, but they amuse the hell out of me. Not for the fact that they are so unstoppable but that they are so ridiculous. I saw this one today, shield your eyes if you are afraid of BAD emails, and I had to share it. Sorry if you are offended in any way but I had to tell you why. 

First: Look at the entire email header. The From line is completely inconsistent, the subject line is that of a pop star, the to line is to someone that does not even exist at this honey pot email address we have set up, and what the hell is that URL they spoof it coming from? Wouldn’t this stop you right there? Well maybe you but I have to look sometimes. 

Second: There is an attachment. When is the last time you saw an email marketing campaign that was legit and professionally done with an attachment? Warning… yes. 

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How often do you get emails spoofing or looking to be from a brand name that you trust? I get them every now and then but this one had me double taking, looking at the headers, and opening it up to code to see what or who it was really from. Now when you go to this length to use a brand like CNN and deliver creative that makes even me think, it has to impact your brand.

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I wanted to share with you a dialogue from last week that I had with a subscriber to our double opt in newsletter list. We had a campaign go out to subscribers that really had not engaged much with our last few months of newsletters and guide/email marketing study releases. The email chain is posted below in reverse order so that you can see the end and read down to what occurred. 

At eROI we take subscribers seriously and we respect email opt in to the nth degree. When I see people that make changes to a profile or subscription with bogus info or setting us up for a spam trap or complaint I react immediately to see why they would take this action. The below was not an unsubscribe, but an individual making a change to a mailinator.com email address as opposed to just opting out. Why would someone do this? Well read the rest of the post to find out. 

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Gmail is having a systemwide outage affecting multiple countries, and a whole bunch of its 100 million users are screaming about it on Twitter. Around 20 million people visit Gmail each day, according to Comscore, and they’re all seeing the same message. The first outages were reported at about 2 pm PST, 44 minutes ago. The Gmail blog is silent on the outage, instead giving readers some useful tips on customizing web clips.

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Email: A New Target For The DEA

According to AOL Mail’s fourth annual Email Addiction Survey, 46% of email users said they’re hooked on email (up from just 15% last year) and 51% check their email four or more times a day. One in five said they check their email more than 10 times a day.

27% are so overwhelmed by their email that they’ve either declared “email bankruptcy,” deleting (or planning to) all their email messages to start anew. 20% of users said they have over 300 emails in their inboxes! 24% admit they’ve signed up for a new email address to start fresh. 69% of email users said they have multiple email accounts, up from 52% in 2007.

Regina Lewis, AOL Online Consumer Advisor, noted that “We really do live in a 24-7 society and it’s not uncommon to be online and checking email at all hours of the day…”

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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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How do I love thee? Let me count the ways..

1. Viagra

2. XXX Fun

3. Nigerian Bank Assistance

Spam Lit (also known as Lit Spam and Literary Spam) is defined as snippets of nonsensical verse and prose embedded in spam e-mail messages. Some of the snippets are made up, others are passages from public domain works (such as Edgar Allan Poe and The Bible), and others are conglomerations of several creative public domain works, which can often be copied off the web and included in e-mail messages hawking software, male enhancement pills, and computers.

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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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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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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.

So with a release a few months back from GoDaddy telling people that they now offer an email marketing platform for GoDaddy Domain owners, they release this… basically if you get a spam complaint and you host your domain with them, they will charge you $200 and $75 to get your domain back. Now everyone (trust me here) deals with a spam complaint every now and then as consumers feel it is easier to mark as spam than it is to unsubscribe. So are they now going to hold brands and companies hostage for pay anytime some marks an email as spam or junk? Or just when they file a formal complaint? I really don’t know but I think this is a bonehead move. Maybe it is just to scare their own customers hwo are using their email marketing service whom host with them as they could be non educated email marketers just happy with paying $7/mo to send emails?

From Deliverability.com

Don’t host domains at GoDaddy if you do email marketing (who doesn’t?)
A reader forwarded this GoDaddy message to me (I have anonymized it) asking for advice. Apparently GoDaddy is now charging for handling spam complaints and has a $200 “spam tax” for clients that do email marketing. If they receive spam complaints against you, they are claiming that they will hold your domain ransom unless you pay $75 to release it.

Basically, GoDaddy is saying that if you do email marketing or have affiliates that send emails linking to your site, they don’t want your business.

http://blog.deliverability.com/2008/06/dont-host-domai.html