The Email Wars

Ok, had to share this. You might laugh, you might say it is dumb, etc. Regardless I got a hoot out of it and I am a dog person not a cat person. The below post is really illustrative of two things. One we create bad terms and more bad terms every day. Two we need to focus on understanding what we hear before playing the game of telephone.

But what spawned this was someone today asking me if I had heard about “cat phishing”. I was not sure what to think. Many ideas ran through my brain of what it could be, but in the end after searching and searching it turns out that is was “copy cat phishing” they heard. Yes now that makes more sense. 

It is something that all brands have to consider as it is everywhere and could negatively impact your own brand and the consumer trust in your brand. But then again so could the avian bird flu, a wayward mack truck, or the news. So until you find the magic brand protection bullet (I think it is co-ownership with the consumer/partner) let’s just enjoy some cat phishin’.

Now the image is funny, but the problem is not. It is kind of like opting in for a camapaign with a name like Mr. Poopypants. I bet there are quite a few other ways we could make a dent here, like a public service campaign of education about email marketing from the DMA, EEC, DM News, and all the other ESPs and marketers. That would most likely help all of us if we took this to the public proactively instead of just sitting back and dealing with 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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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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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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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.

More than 75 percent of all email today is spam, placing a significant strain on your network, budget, and employee productivity. Our objective is to leverage mail security intelligence from the Symantec Global Intelligence Network to help protect your business from spam. By offering up-to-date expert resources, such as the monthly State of Spam Report, this site gives you a central source to turn to for the latest on spam.

Overall: http://www.symantec.com/business/theme.jsp?themeid=state_of_spam

July 2008 PDF http://eval.symantec.com/mktginfo/enterprise/other_resources/b-state_of_spam_report_07-2008.en-us.pdf

“For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in Naperville, Ill., the decision to abandon cyber-sense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee experiment was a bit of a lark. The idea of the Spammed Persistently All Month (S.P.A.M.) experiment — which fittingly started on April Fool’s Day — was to have 50 volunteers from around the world answer every spam message and pop-up ad they got. Mooney was game, especially since McAfee was giving a free PC to all participants. She told her story to Network World.”

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/070108-mcafee-spam-experiment.html?hpg1=bn

Every once in a while I come across a funny post or in this case Tweet, about Spam and what it means to people. This one in particular I think we can all, no matter our profession, can understand. It is that little thing that keeps the crap in our inboxes coming, the fact that people no matter what will still click on an email that they KNOW is not valid or right. 

But I think we can all laugh at this.

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

I know that many of you that read this email marketing blog might relate to what I am about to share with you. The names have been removed to protect the crazy. Now not saying that this person was crazy, just passionate about getting off a clients opt in list. Every once in a while we get people that do not want to use the unsub link or reply to the sender to remove them from their list. So what do they do? They look at the headers of the email and find out who the email service provide (ESP) is and send us the email.

I know many of you have got these. We take them very seriously and reply immediately and take action even faster. But this one illustrates the fun in the ESP world we get to experience. Totally transparent with all of you here.

I have actually written a post some months back that I am still on the fence about posting from an amazing phone call I got from a guy that got an opt in email from one of our clients. Still don’t know if I will ever post it. We will see. It is insane, as was the caller.

But here it is in all of it’s glory. Is it clear what this person wants? And how long did it take to create this email? If I take the rules of clarity in copy writing into practice, this person nailed it. Consider yourself removed. But what client were you emailing about? Love this industry?