Word to the Wise

The FTC announced today they will be publishing clarifications to CAN SPAM in the near future. According to the FTC

The new rule provisions address four topics: (1) an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender; (2) the definition of “sender” was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements; (3) a “sender” of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under United States Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a “valid physical postal address”; and (4) a definition of the term “person” was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.

Once the rules are published, I will be sure to link to them and comment on them here. From the FTC press release, it seems that the rules are reasonably sane and any current mailer following best practices will already be in compliance.

Hat tip: MailChimp

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Venkat posts today about the ruling in the Asis v. Azoogle case. I have not yet had a chance to read the whole ruling, but in talking with Mickey over at SpamSuite it seems to expand the Gordon ruling a bit.

Mickey posts on Intellectual Intercourse about spam received from a recruiting agency trying to get him to hire one of their clients. This spam was amusing in that it contained reference to a bill that Mickey helped defeat years ago.

Box of Meat blog links to a CSO online article graphically demonstrating a botnet. The representation is really helps to understand the scope of the problem.

On Bronto Blog DJ posts about resurrecting old addresses. He has it right when he says: “If you continue to send email to customers that is random and unexpected, there will be consequences.”

Matt at ReturnPath has a couple posts about who should get delivery services and how ReturnPath chooses customers. This is something I end up dealing with occasionally. There are not specific types of companies I refuse to do consulting for. I will generally provide consulting on best practices to any business segment. My one restriction is that I will not provide ISP relations (ie, contacting the ISPs) for companies that do not send opt-in email. This has caused consternation with some potential customers.

Mark Brownlow at No Man is an iland suggests renaming “open rate” as “render rate” in an effort to make it much clearer what “open rates” really measure. Expect to see render rates referred to here on this blog in the future.

Josh talks about suppression list abuse on Deliverability.com. For those of us who use unique addresses for every signup, it quickly becomes clear that there are leaks in the suppression process. I have also seen problems with leaks from subscriptions, so do not think the problem is just in suppressions.

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The Email Experience Council is the email marketing arm of the Direct Marketing Association. They recently sent out a mailing that demonstrated what not to do when sending email, including:

• sending out multiple copies of an email to the same recipients
• sending offers from a third party to recipients who did not opt-in for third party mail
• sending mail from a unrecognized address
• sending an offer of no interest to many of their recipients

In addition to the email mistakes, they also made some serious marketing mistakes, such as

• leaving out the branding
• leaving out personalization

The execution of this mailing was abysmal.

I have no direct experience with the EEC, but if they are truly leaders in the email industry, then they will use this experience with email gone horribly wrong as an example. There are lessons here, for the EEC and for all email marketers. Ideally, those lessons will be learned and shared in detail so that other marketers will not repeat these mistakes.

Other articles on this: BeRelevant, Ken Magill, EmailKarma, EEC.

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Eddie Davidson was sentenced yesterday to 21 months in jail for falsifying headers and tax evasion.

Sanford Wallace (the spammer that prompted me to start figuring out how to read headers) lost his suit with MySpace for failure to comply with court orders and failing to turn over documents.

Scott and Steve Richter are in the Washington Post today in an article discussing hijacked IP space. Reading the Post article, though, it appears that Scott legitimately bought a business with a /16 and there is no hijacking going on. Spammers have hijacked IP space illegitimately in the past, but this does not seem to be the case.

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Denise Cox has a list of 10 things your signup page should have over on her blog.

The AOL postmaster blog has its first post up talking about bounces.

BeRelevant has a great blog with lots of suggestions email best practices.

Mark Brownlow had a great post this weekon moving the unsubscribe button to the top of your newsletter to make it easy for customers to unsubscribe. The comments are a must read as well, including one commenter that saw the number of ‘this is spam’ hits go down when he moved the unsubscribe link to the top of the email.

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Ken Magill has a great article up today about how many marketers expect their ESPs to fix their delivery problems when in reality the marketers policies and practices are the real problem.

If enough recipients think a marketer’s e-mail program is garbage, no e-mail service provider in the world will be able to prevent spam complaints, and the resulting delivery troubles. Likewise, if a marketer refuses to clean dead addresses off their list because one of those addresses just might, maybe, someday make a purchase, there isn’t a single ESP out there who will be able to stop Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft from diverting the marketer’s messages into recipients’ spam folders or blocking them altogether.

A marketer can’t ride an ESP’s e-mail reputation, folks.

Go read the whole thing. Learn it. Live it.

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Today’s edition of Magilla Marketing announced that Dave Linhardt and e360 have sued Comcast. Spamsuite.com has the text of the complaint up.

On the surface this seems quite silly. e360 is alleging a number of things, including that Comcast is committing a denial of service attack against e360 and locking up e360’s servers for more than 5 hours. Additionally, e360 is laying blame at the feet of multiple spam filtering companies, including Spamhaus, Trend Micro and Brightmail.

One of the more absurd claims is that Comcast is fraudulently transmitting ‘user unknown’ messages. At no point do they explain how or why they think this is the case, but simply assert:

Comcast has transmitted fraudulent bounce information to e360’s mail servers specific to email addresses contained on e360’s opt-in marketing list. The responses sent by Comcast mail servers to e360 are fraudulent because they contain information indicating that the email address is invalid and not active. As an email marketer, e360 relies on bounce information from Comcast’s mail servers to determine whether e360’s customer email addresses are still active and deliverable. e360 has information and reason to believe Comcast is intentionally transmitting fraudulent bounce information to e360 in an attempt to discourage e360 from sending additional email messages. By transmitting fraudulent bounce information, Comcast is effectively destroying e360’s proprietary assets and the value contained in e360’s opt-in database of email addresses. Such statements are made on information and belief as only Comcast has access to and knowledge of the accounts it has and will not allow e360’s emails to be delivered regardless of account activity.

I really do not think that Comcast is maliciously and deliberately faking that addresses are dead in order to destroy e360’s business. It just does not pass the sniff test. Why would Comcast do that? What possible benefit could there be to doing that?

Another interesting bit of the complaint is e360’s assertion they have been approved for the SenderScore Certified program offered through ReturnPath. Ken interviewed George Bilbrey. According to Ken

However, George Bilbrey, head of Return Path’s delivery assurance unit said e360 had not been certified.
“He applied and didn’t gain admittance to the program,” Bilbrey said, declining to elaborate.

The punchline is e360 is suing Comcast for around 21 million dollars because Comcast is being MEAN and, well, here’s what e360 has to say:

58. At the same time that Comcast is blocking e360’s email messages that are compliant with Comcast’s polices, Comcast is allowing other email marketers with substantially similar business practices as those employed by e360 to send email messages to Comcast’s customers.
59. Comcast’s refusal to deliver email sent by e360 while allowing its competitors to freely transmit email puts e360 at a disadvantage and creates an un-level playing field on which e360 must compete.
60. Upon information and belief, Comcast has made agreements, either written or verbal, to allow certain email marketers to send or transmit email without interruption regardless of whether such email meets Comcast’s Acceptable Use policy. Based on these agreements, Comcast has applied its policies with certain email marketers in a way that is materially different than Comcast’s application of its policies to e360’s email messages. Such statement is made upon information and belief because only Comcast can verify with whom they have agreements with to allow mail to be sent to their customers.

It will be interesting to see what happens once the judge reads the complaint. In my very non-legal opinion I am not seeing a real cause of action here. There is case law and statutory law that says ISPs have the ability to filter mail to their subscribers. Apparently e360 thinks they can convince a judge to ignore facts and law in order to make Comcast stop being mean to them.

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Al Ralsky is a very prolific spammer and his name is well known among ISP abuse desks.  Along with 10 other people he was indicted today after a 2 year investigation by the Justice Department, according to an article published today by  the Detroit Free Press.

U.S. Attorney Stephen J. Murphy said, “Today’s charges seek to knock out one of the largest illegal spamming and fraud operations in the country, an international scheme to make money by manipulating stock prices through illegal spam e-mail promotions. I commend the excellent investigative work of the FBI, Postal Inspection Service, and the IRS-Criminal Investigation Division. I also wish to recognize the significant support and expertise provided by the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice.”

Al has a long history of spamming, and has been involved in legal actions with ISPs in the past, including one suit where he was sued by Verizon for sending spam to Verizon subscribers. That suit was eventually settled.

This suit can only be good for legitimate email senders. Gangs like Al Ralsky’s make it much more difficult for ISPs to selectively block spam, and trying to combat their use of botnets has resulted in legitmate email being blocked. Removing them as a source of spam will make it easier for ISPs to segregate good mail from bad mail.

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Mark Brownlow has an interview with the author of Email Marketing For Dummies. It is a great summary of the book and gives some good hints to anyone interested in starting to use email as a marketing and customer retention tool.

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A couple articles came out today talking about ISP requirements and how to find them.

EmailInsider talks about ISP best practices and how merely complying with CAN-SPAM is not enough to get good delivery at the ISPs.

Meanwhile, over at ClickZ, Stefan talks about what the ISPs want from you and how to find the information online.

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