Monthly Archive for May, 2008

Comcast “hacked”

Comcast recently had their whois registration password compromised by hackers, who then changed the authoritative DNS servers from the real ones to ones run by the hackers. Today Wired has an article saying that the hackers warned Comcast that this would happen. 

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Angry Pills Spammer

It looks like Postmaster Direct angered some pills spammer. This morning I received spam redirecting to a Canadian Healthcare pharmacy site (selling me Viagra at 73% off!) containing the footer from a Postmaster Direct email. 

The term “Joe Job” is used when a spammer deliberately uses spam to cause harm to a specific person or company. In this case, it may or may not be a Joe Job against Postmaster Direct. There have been cases of spammers stealing text and graphics from legitimate ESPs and using that text in an email. Whether that is to make the ESP look bad or the sender look more legitimate is not clear. 

Given ReturnPath’s position in the industry, though, it’s certainly possible this is an aggrieved spammer looking to inflict a little pain on one of the most trusted email certifiers. 

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Funding the lawsuit

Mickey asks if you want to be the sender that funds the lawsuit that establishes case law about your new, nifty process. 

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Israel Spam Law

Israel has passed a new anti-spam law requiring senders to only send opt-in email, according to the Jerusalem Post.

 

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Those addresses are costing you

Mark Brownlow has a post up about the hidden costs of bad email marketing. These center around brand damage, but there are other costs to poor email marketing strategies.

Previously, having old and non-responsive email addresses on a mailing list did not hurt and may have helped a reputation at an ISP. In some cases, these addresses may have even helped a reputation by increasing the number of emails delivered thus lowering the overall percentage of complaints.

More recently, some ISPs have started looking at the characteristics of recipients as part of the reputation score of a sender. If a sender is mailing a lot of abandoned email addresses, these ISPs can detect that fact. This counts against a senders reputation and may result in email ending up in the bulk folder or being blocked at the transaction.

Many senders are extremely resistant to removing old addresses from their lists. Some of the more numbers driven ones have even followed the statistics and can tell me exactly how many people ignore their email for 12 months or 18 months, and then come back and make a large purchase. This is true, sometimes people will ignore email for a long time and then come back. Keeping these people on a list may be beneficial.

However, in those recipients who ignore email (no opens, no clicks) for a long time are some addresses that have been abandoned. While these addresses are not spamtraps, repeatedly sending email to large numbers of abandoned addresses will lower the sender’s reputation over time.

All senders should have a process for dealing with non-active addresses. Allowing cruft to accumulate on a list does negatively affect reputation.

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Anger

Seth Godin writes about angry people. Every marketer should ask where their recipients are on that curve. 

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New Blog Theme

As you can see we have updated the blog theme. This is a custom theme based on the WordPress K2 theme. The overall look is much lighter and fits in better with our main website.

As part of the change I have also re-categorized all the previous posts into 4 categories: 

  • Best Practices contains posts about best practices for delivery, both in terms of technology and in terms of policy. This is also where stories of bad practices are included as examples of what not to do.
  • Delivery Improvement contains posts discussing how to improve delivery, including examples from my experiences with clients. Announcements about ISP changes are also in this category. 
  • Industry is commentary on posts from other delivery and marketing blogs, news articles and happenings in the industry.
  • Legal has posts about email related civil cases, comments on laws affecting email delivery and comments on criminal prosecutions of spammers. 
The old categories have been converted into tags. New posts will be both categorized and tagged. 

Across the top are navigation links. I expect to add a link to reference pages, including links to ISP websites, in the near future. The About section will also be expanded with more information about Word to the Wise. 

On a wide browser, the blog is set up as a 3 column blog. The far left column is for posts and content. The middle column has a search box, links to posts in the 4 categories and an Asides box. The Asides box contains links and very short posts and I expect to update this frequently. There is a separate RSS feed for Asides posts. 

The far right column has a calendar showing the full month and days with new posts. Clicking on the months under the calendar moves you back and forth through the months. Clicking on the arrows centered under the calendar displays a list of post titles for that month. Under the calendar is a blogroll, and links to recent posts and recent comments. There is an RSS feed available for recent comments. 

The 3 column design neatly collapses to a single column design for narrower windows. The far right column folds under the middle column. For very narrow windows, the middle and right columns are folded to the bottom of the page under the main content. 

In the content column, main posts have icons indicating what category they are included in, a permanent link to the post (which will act as a trackback link), a link to see other posts in the same category and the author. At the bottom of the post is a link to the comments page. As you scroll down the page, navigation to older pages sits at the top of your browser window, making it easy to move backwards or forwards through the blog. 

Clicking on the post title or “more” shows you the whole post and any current comments. There is a navigation bar at the top that lets you navigate across posts (this does not work on some older browsers). 

On the comments page, you can read comments, subscribe to a RSS feed for comments to that post and make new comments on a post. There are comment avatars, randomly generated from Gravatar.com. If you have registered at gravatar, that will be displayed for you instead of the monster avatar. 

Overall, these changes should make the blog easier to read. We are still tweaking things, so if you have any thoughts, comments or bug reports feel free to comment. 

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Yahoo suing lottery spammers

Yahoo filed suit against spammers using the Yahoo trademarks in lottery spam on May 19th. 

 

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More evidence the DMA does not get it

A friend of mine sent me a link to a blog a few weeks ago. Jeff Nolan points out that to get to content on the DMA website one must go through a registration process. Not only do you have to register, but the registration requires you first search the DMA database to see if you are already registered. Jeff has screen shots of the process.

I fully understand the desire to control access to information put on the web, and the desire to know who is reading your stuff. And, of course, the DMA is all about collecting personal information in order to provide meaningful targeted advertising to recipients. If this is not their goal with the website, then there is no reason to require registration.

Taken with the EEC fiasco, it demonstrates that the DMA is not a leader in online marketing.

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Hard drive failure

I’m feeing a bit disconnected today. See, my hard drive failed last night and my laptop would not boot. Thanks to the local Apple store Genius bar and Apple Care my current laptop is in getting repaired. Unfortunately, that means I am stuck on my old machine without any of my RSS feeds or bookmarks and a mail client that has taken all day to sync with my IMAP server.

Tomorrow will be better.

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