Spam, delivery, email and more
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.
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.
Mickey asks if you want to be the sender that funds the lawsuit that establishes case law about your new, nifty process.
Israel has passed a new anti-spam law requiring senders to only send opt-in email, according to the Jerusalem Post.
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.
Seth Godin writes about angry people. Every marketer should ask where their recipients are on that curve.
Yahoo filed suit against spammers using the Yahoo trademarks in lottery spam on May 19th.
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.
