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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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?

Hotmail users getting locked out

Imagine getting an e-mail from a friend or family member with the following subject line: “ITS IMPORTANT YOU GET BACK ME TODAY.”

CNET is aware of a couple of Hotmail users who have recently gotten locked out of their accounts. In one case, someone who had hacked into an account sent a desperate-sounding e-mail asking for money under the account holder’s name.

Microsoft had no direct comment.

Read Article

Hi, My name is Dylan and I work for a company called eROI. We have an ESP product called emailROI. We use it for our own email communications and are quite happy with it. So why in the hell would you send me an offer to get a Vertical Response account? I love these third party list rentals. They never know much about anyone on their list. Just happy with the CPM of an email address, and wham bam thank you mam… here you go Dylan an offer you just can’t refuse.

Wow. When I do a list rentals for clients I make sure to suppress against know addresses of comp, etc. Vertical Response you need to do the same. I know the shot gun approach can work from time to time, but you are not displaying industry leading best practices and most likely attracting clients that will do the same.

Best part about this is they are using my emailROI email address that I stopped using over 4 years ago. And this sender is something that I have never heard from before in my life nor have I got emails from them before. Crazy. Like the line in Animal House, “Pledge him, we need the dues.”

If you do any list rentals or partnering use this as a lesson of what not to do, or call me and I will be happy to walk you through best practices.

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How New CAN-SPAM Rules Affect Marketers

The FTC has just announced it has approved four new rule provisions to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. MarketingSherpa’s Senior Reporter Chris Heine discusses the changes with Jeff Mills, Director of Sales and Strategy at eROI. Listen to our podcast to discover how these changes will affect email marketers and what they’ll have to do differently to be in compliance. The provisions are expected to take effect this summer.

http://podcast.marketingyak.com/flash/can_spam/index.html

The cats who brought you “SERP SERPBACKS Badass Song” and “SEO Soul” introduce you to Funk 2.0, “I’m Gonna Git You Spamma!,” the newest flick from the Calacanis Collection. Veronica Belmont stars as the foxy heroine, who fights the ringleaders of the spam underworld. Can you digg it?

MySpace has informed us that on Monday it was awarded $234 million in statutory damages, the largest anti-spam sum ever made under CAN-SPAM and apparently ever under any law. This is also the first time damages have been awarded under the California Anti Phishing Act.

The case was won against two notorious spammers, Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines. Wallace earned the nicknames “Spamford” and “spam king” for having sent as many as 30 million spam messages per day during a period of time in the 1990s.

Read the full story>>

Final Can-Spam Regs Define ‘Sender,’ Preserve 10-Day Opt-Outs
Mediapost by Wendy Davis, Tuesday, May 13, 2008 8:00 AM ET

After mulling new rules for e-mail marketers for three years, the Federal Trade Commission Monday issued final Can-Spam regulations that spell out how to determine which marketer is the “sender” when more than one advertises in the same message.

The new rules provide that marketers advertising in one joint e-mail can designate which company will be considered the sender and will be responsible for Can-Spam compliance. That designated company will have to make sure that the e-mail gives recipients a way to opt-out of future ads, and also will have to put its name in the “from” line and have a valid postal address in the e-mail. The multi-sender scenario often occurs with travel marketing, where airlines, hotels and car rental companies send one combined message to e-mail recipients.

Janis Kestenbaum, an FTC lawyer in the Bureau of Consumer Protection, said the new rule aims to allow marketers who want to use joint e-mails to easily to do so, while also providing crucial information to recipients. “We were looking to help consumers to readily identify who the quote-unquote ’sender’ is within the meaning of the Can-Spam act,” she said.

The final rule marks a change from the FTC’s 2005 proposal, which said that any company that controlled the content of an email would be considered a “sender.” But the commission decided that standard wasn’t workable because all marketers typically have some input into the ad copy, Kestenbaum said.

The FTC also will continue giving marketers up to 10 days to stop sending messages to consumers who opt-out. The 2005 proposals would have curtailed the time to three days, but the agency decided that change wasn’t necessary.

“There wasn’t any evidence that people were using that 10-day period to mail bomb people, so it wouldn’t help consumers to shorten it,” Kestenbaum said.

The new guidelines also clarify that marketers may not require recipients to pay a fee or complete a survey, or provide other extraneous information when opting out of future ads.

When the FTC proposed the rules three years ago, more than 150 organizations, companies and advocates weighed in with comments, including the Online Publishers Association, Time Warner and the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The new regulations will become effective 45 days after they are published in the Federal Register, which is expected to occur later this month.

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.

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