Word to the Wise

Email, Delivery, Spam and more

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Aug

17

2010

How not to build a mailing list

I mentioned yesterday one of the major political blogs launched their mailing list yesterday. I pointed out a number of things they did that may cause problems. Today, I discovered another problem.

This particular blog has been around for a long time, probably close to 10 years. It allows anyone to join and create their own blogs and comment with registered users. As part of their new mailing list, they added everyone who has ever registered to their mailing list. They did not send a “we have a new list, want to join it?” email, they added every registered user to the list and said “you can opt out if you want.”

This is such a bad idea. My own account was used once, to make one comment, back in 2005. Yes, 2005. It’s been almost 5 years since I last logged into the site. Sure, I have email addresses that go back that far, but not everyone does. That list is going to be full of problems: dead addresses, spamtraps, duplicates, unengaged and uninterested.

Seriously, they’re adding people who’ve not logged into their site in 5 years to a mailing list. How can this NOT go horribly wrong?

My initial thought was this was going to blow up in a week. I’m now guessing they’ll start seeing delivery problems a lot sooner than that.

Tags: complaints, Confirmed (double) opt-in, email, engagement, Marketing, politics.

1 comment

Aug

16

2010

Email and politics

By laura in Best Practices.

I occasionally consult for activists using email. Their needs and requirements are a little different from email marketers. Sure, the requirements for email delivery are the same: relevant and engaging mail to people who requested it. But there are complicating issues that most marketers don’t necessarily have to deal with.

Activist groups are attractive targets for forged signups. Think about it, when people get deeply involved in arguments on the internet, they often look for ways to harass the person on the other end of the disagreement. They will often signup the people they’re disagreeing with for mailing lists. When the disagreements are political, the logical target is a group on the other side of the political divide.

People also sign up spamtraps and bad addresses as a way to cause problems or harass the political group itself. Often this results in the activist group getting blocked. This never ends well, as instead of fixing the problem, the group goes yelling about how their voice is being silenced and their politics are being censored!!

No, they’re not being silenced, they’re running an open mailing list and a lot of people are on it who never asked to be on it. They’re complaining and the mail is getting blocked.

With that as background, I noticed one of the major political blogs announced their brand new mailing list today. Based on their announcement it seemed they that they may have talked to someone who knew about managing a mailing list.

Email activism is a key weapon in a modern activist organization’s arsenal, yet [website] has never jumped in. It was less a matter of will, and more a lack of resources and expertise. Managing a big email list is surprisingly complex, and we’ve been too small and overworked to do something we should’ve done a long time ago.

As a matter of professional curiosity, I signed up. What’s their signup like? Are they following best practices?

Sadly. No.

Their signup form asks for a first name, an email address and a zip code. Fill in the information and hit “submit.” The landing page says “Thanks for signing up” but provides none of the data that any delivery expert recommends. They mention nothing about frequency. They mention nothing about what they’re going to do with my email address.

They do send a welcome message almost immediately. It’s a bit bare bones:

Thanks for joining the [website] email action list!

If you would like to tell a friend to join, just point them to the following URL:

http://campaigns.example.com/signup_page/Signup1

Thanks again,
[signoff]
Founder, [website]

This should, at a minimum, have information about my signup and the chance to opt-out if there was an error. Comply with CAN SPAM, while not required as they are a political group, is such a minor thing they should be doing so. And, of course, this site is a big enough target, that I think they should be confirming every subscription. That will reduce the complaints from the targets of harassment and prevent people who don’t like them from being able to harm their delivery.

Tags: complaints, Confirmed (double) opt-in, email, engagement, Marketing, politics.

No comments

Aug

13

2010

Should you respond to complaints

By laura in Best Practices.

David Spinks asks on twitter:

Should you ever contact someone who made an abuse complaint about your newsletter to find out why

My answer was: It depends, but it’s too complicated to explain in 140 characters.

I don’t suggest responding to people who hit the “this is spam” button as a way of complaining. FBLs are complaints, but they are people who don’t necessarily want to engage with you. If they wanted to engage they would have contacted you.

It’s a little trickier when you get complaints directly from recipients. There are a number of reasons people might send you a complaint directly: to honestly engage in a discussion about your mail, to try and track down who might be selling or signing up their email address or to vent their anger at bulk mailers in general.

You can’t always identify which type of recipient just from their initial email, but there are some hints. Complaints cc’d to dozens of email addresses generally aren’t looking for a response, they just want those evil spammers disconnected. Responses to this group of complainers will often be published on mailing lists, newsgroups or on websites. Attempting to engage them usually ends badly for everyone but the complainer. (Example 1, Example 2, Example 3, Example 4)

On the other hand, there are folks who are contacting you because they think you care about your network and will want to stop abuse from happening. My complaints, for instance, are often only sent to places I think will care. I’m not going to waste my time sending in a complaint to some place that just deletes them. So they tend to be very short and it can be productive to engage with them.

Tags: abuse, complaints, Spam.

No comments

Aug

12

2010

Thursday mini-audit – part 3

By steve in Industry.

Four weeks ago you signed up for your mailing list using a virgin email address. (You didn’t? Maybe you should do that today – there’s no time like Thursday for a quick sanity check!)

Check the mailbox for the account you signed up

Is the mail you signed up for in the inbox? If you’re mailing at least weekly then there should be at least three messages there. Do they have identical From: addresses – if not, your recipients will be less likely to recognise them as from you, and will find it harder to whitelist mail from you by adding contacts to their address book. Are the subject lines consistent enough that they reflect your brand and help recipients recognise that the mail is from you?
Is some of the mail you expected in the bulk folder? It shouldn’t be, as you added the From address used to your address book three weeks ago, so the mail should be coming directly to your inbox. Dig deeper and find out why.
Is some of the mail you expected missing altogether? That’d be bad. Take a look at your delivery logs and find out why.
Is there mail from anyone else in your inbox or bulk folder? There really shouldn’t be, unless you’re selling email addresses or sharing them with partners (which is a fairly bad idea in itself). If there’s mail from partners, is it clear that the recipient is receiving the mail because they signed up with you? If there’s mail from strangers… someone is stealing from you – you have a security problem or a crooked employee or contractor.
Take a look at all the messages you’ve received. Is there consistent branding across, them? Is it clear that they’re from you?
Is it clear how someone should unsubscribe? If it’s not crystal clear, recipients will just hit the “This is Spam” button instead, and you don’t want that.
If your business is based on a website where you need to log in, make sure you’re logged out.
Click on the unsubscribe link. Where does it take you? The unsubscribe page should ideally have similar branding to your newsletter or corporate site. A plain bare-bones web page will make people suspicious.
1. If the unsubscribe link that takes you to a page that says “You’ve been unsubscribed” without mentioning your email address, that’s bad. A lot of spammers include “unsubscribe” links that point to static pages that look like that, and they’re the sort of thing that make people familiar with bulk email nervous – and people who run blacklists or manage corporate or ISP filtering are very familiar with bulk email. Don’t do that.
2. If the unsubscribe link takes you to a page that says “your@email.address has been unsubscribed” then that’s quite a bit better – but it means that people could be unsubscribed accidentally if they forward the email on to someone else, or if they’re using software that pre-visits links in email, or if they’re just visiting the link to see what options they have for controlling their subscription. So don’t do that.
3. Does it lead to a page that requires them to enter their email address in order to unsubscribe? That’s… kinda OK, and is legal under CAN-SPAM, but you already know their email address and could handle that automatically. It’s an additional barrier that might cause recipients to hit the “This is Spam” button instead of completing the unsub process. It can also cause problems where someone has a forwarded email address – “their” email address may be at AOL, while the subscribed email address might be at acm.org. It’s an OK approach, but it’s possible to do a lot better.
4. Does it lead to a page that says “If you’d like to unsubscribe your@email.address, click this button” that’s pretty darn good. A variant of this is to have a text field where you can enter an email address, but have it pre-filled with the right email address. If it’s clear what mailing list, sent by what company, you’ll be unsubscribing from then that’s even better.
5. Does it lead to a page that requires you to log in with a username and password to unsubscribe? If so, that violates CAN-SPAM requirements (and a bunch of other legislation). Really don’t do that.
6. Does it require you to provide any other information (“why you want to unsubscribe”, for example)? You’re not allowed to do that by CAN-SPAM. You can ask for additional information, as long as you don’t require it, but if you do you should make it very clear that it’s optional.
When you click the button to confirm the unsubscription, what happens? Does it tell you you’ve been unsubscribed and tell you what you’ve been unsubscribed from, all branded to match newsletter or corporate style? That’s good. It’s also a good place to allow people to resubscribe, should they want to, and maybe ask why they unsubscribed, as long as it’s done with care. Does it just send you to the corporate home page? That’s bad, as there’s no confirmation of the unsubscription to the recipient. Just a blank page or bare-bones “you’ve been unsubscribed” page? Not great. If it says that “You’ll be unsubscribed some time in the next ten business days” or similar, that’s legal according to CAN-SPAM but is the sort of behaviour that’ll upset recipients and cause them to hit the “This is Spam” button.
Does it send you an email to which you’ll need to respond in order for the unsubscription to take effect? That’d bad in a lot of ways, and violates CAN-SPAM.
Does it send you an email to confirm that you’ve been unsubscribed? This can be a really good idea, or a really bad one depending on the style of the list and the recipient demographic. Think about what your recipients will find helpful.
Try and unsubscribe again. If it tells you that you’ve already unubscribed, or you’re not a subscriber to the list that’s good. If it tells you that you’ve been unsubscribed just the same as the first time that’ll make people suspcious that it’s not a real unsubscription handler, which can lead to problems with spam filters and blacklist removal.
For extra credit, and only if you’re on first name terms with someone who manages the subscription database and have cleared it with them first, try and hack the unsubscription link. If it has an obvious email address in it, change that to a different one and see what happens. If it has apparently random numbers in it, try modifying one to be one more or less and see what happens. In all cases this should throw an error (as the unsubscription link should have some level of data integrity checks on it).
Set a date in your calendar to come back here for part 4 on Thursday October 7th

2 comments

Aug

11

2010

SPF records: not really all that important

By laura in Best Practices.

I’ve been working through some Hotmail issues with a client over the last few months. One of the things that has become clear to me is how little Hotmail actually does with SPF records. In fact, Hotmail completely ignored my client’s SPF record and continued to deliver email into the inbox.

This isn’t just a sender that had a “well, we think most of our email will come from these IPs but aren’t telling you to throw away email that doesn’t” record. In fact, this client specifically said “if email doesn’t come from this /28 range of email addresses, then it is unauthorized and should be thrown away.” The email was being sent from an IP outside of the range listed in the SPF record.

As part of the process involved in fixing the delivery problems, I had the client update their SPF record and then I enrolled their domain in the SenderID program at Hotmail. This didn’t have any effect, though. Hotmail is still not checking SPF for this client. When I asked Hotmail what was going on they said, “We do not do lookups on every sender’s mail.”

So, there you have it folks. The last bastion of SPF/SenderID has abandoned the technology. Even a totally invalid SPF record doesn’t matter, mail can still reach the inbox at Hotmail.

Tags: Hotmail, inbox, senderid, spf.

5 comments

Aug

09

2010

Spamfilters: a marketer’s best friend

By laura in Industry.

I was cleaning out my spam folder this afternoon. I try and do it at least once a day, otherwise the volume gets so bad I don’t actually look at the mail I just mark it all as read. I realized, though, that spamfilters are actually a marketer’s best friend.

If there were no spam filters keeping all the crap people get out of their inbox (in my case over 1000 messages a day) then spam would overwhelm even the most dedicated email junkie. I couldn’t do my job without my spam filters, and in fact the recent rash of virus spew is ending up in my inbox and making finding real mail a problem. I do a lot of sorting before mail ever hits my inbox, and I’m still struggling to deal with the couple hundred “your order has shipped!” and “please her tonight!” emails that my local bayesian filters haven’t caught up to, yet.

Today’s stats:
Work inbox: 17 messages
Work spam: 419
95.9% spam

Personal inbox: 40
Personal spam: 975
95.9% spam

Without filters, I couldn’t accurately find that 4.1% of real mail that I get. Without filters, I couldn’t do my job. Without filters, I couldn’t find the real receipts from purchases I actually made. Without filters, I couldn’t read and respond to mail I wanted.

A mailbox overflowing with spam is unuseable, and email marketers should be thankful that providers work so hard to keep spam out. Otherwise, email wouldn’t be useful for anything.

Tags: inbox, Spam, spam filters.

1 comment

Aug

06

2010

Aug

04

2010

Poor delivery can’t be fixed with technical perfection

By laura in Best Practices.

There are a number of different things delivery experts can do help senders improve their own delivery. Yes, I said it: senders are responsible for their delivery. ESPs, delivery consultants and deliverability experts can’t fix delivery for senders, they can only advise.

In my own work with clients, I usually start with making sure all the technical issues are correct. As almost all spam filtering is score based, and the minor scores given to things like broken authentication and header issues and formatting issues can make the difference between an email that lands in the inbox and one that doesn’t get delivered.

I don’t think I’m alone in this approach, as many of my clients come to me for help with their technical settings. In some cases, though, fixing the technical problems doesn’t fix the delivery issues. No matter how much my clients tweak their settings and attempt to avoid spamfilters by avoiding FREE!! in the subject line, or changing the background, they still can’t get mail in the inbox.

Why not? Because they’re sending mail that the recipients don’t really want, for whatever reason. There are so many ways a sender can collect an email address without actually collecting consent to send mail to that recipient. Many of the “list building” strategies mentioned by a number of experts involve getting a fig leaf of permission from recipients without actually having the recipient agree to receive mail.

Is there really any difference in permission between purchasing a list of “qualified leads” and automatically adding anyone who makes a purchase at a website to marketing lists? From the recipient’s perspective they’re still getting mail they don’t want, and all the technical perfection in the world can’t overcome the negative reputation associated with spamming.

The secret to inbox delivery: don’t send mail that looks like spam. That includes not sending mail to people who have not expressly consented to receive mail.