Reading some of the articles on the case, though, I’m less worried. This isn’t a blogger making some statements. Instead, Ms. Cox acted more like a stalker and harasser than a reporter. The judge even concluded that had she been granted protection as a journalist it was unlikely she could prevail as there was little factual basis for her statements.

Others have done better summaries of the case and the effect and I encourage everyone to read them.

Seattle Weekly
New York Times
Ars Technica
Forbes

I also discourage folks from applying this ruling to all bloggers. It’s not clear she was doing anything journalistic. I did find it interesting that some of her techniques to ruin the lawyer’s search results were defined as Search Engine Optimization. I’ve long thought SEO was akin to spam: say something often enough in enough places and you start to dominate the conversation. Not because you have anything useful to say, but because no one can get an idea in otherwise.

J.D. Falk has a post up about the history of DKIM.

If you meet me on the street and ask me what my job is I’ll tell you that I work with companies who send bulk email to make sure that they’re not sending spam. I do this by educating clients into good practices and teaching them how to send mail people want to receive. What this statement doesn’t tell people is that usually clients find me because they have been suspended by their ISP for spamming or blocked by some receiver.

Clients who find me because they can’t send mail usually hire me to solve their immediate problem. And I do give the the best advice I can to resolve their problem. But fixing today’s problem isn’t enough, you also need to fix the processes that caused the problem. To me, a critical part of my job is to set clients up for long term success by creating procedures that will get them delisted and keep them from being relisted in the future.

Sometimes, though, I have those moments Al is talking about. When clients don’t actually want to fix their problems, they just want to argue. They want to argue about the definition of spam. They want to argue about permission. They want to argue about how awful their ISPs are for suspending their account. They want to argue about CAN SPAM. They want to argue about free speech. They are angry and they want to fight.

My role is to listen to them, then guide them down a constructive path. I do turn out to be the sounding board for a lot of customers, sometimes they just need to know someone is listening to them. Once they get it all out we can move on into solving the problem.

But, boy, are there the occasional conversations where I just want to scream, “JUST STOP SPAMMING!”

1. If a user deletes a mail without reading it multiple times, Hotmail asks the user if they want to unsubscribe from the mail.
2. Users can use a the new “sweep” feature to delete or file multiple emails easily

Finally, Hotmail confirms that mail can be moved from bulk folder to inbox before the user reads it if the reputation of the sender changes.

Facebook is signing mail with DKIM, but using a very weak key that could be cracked easily. Anyone signing with DKIM should use RSA-1024 keys, nothing less.

Tagged.com is facing legal action brought by the NY AG’s office for not turning a blind eye to child porn.

Facebook’s COO announces the death of email. News at 11. I’ve been hearing announcements about the death of email since I got my first real .edu account back in ’93 or so and I will believe it when I see it. Given how much email Facebook actually sends, I can’t imagine what they’re thinking here. Facebook is the new Myspace, which is the new Geocities. Social networking may be useful for some things, but somehow I can’t imagine trying to get a customer delisted from Spamhaus by posting on a Facebook wall. Or handling receipts from online purchases or any of the other things that people use email for that don’t involve socializing with friends.

A bucket of announcements came out over the last week.

The uber smart folks at Mailchimp have a new iPad app called Chimpadeedoo. This app lets merchants collect email addresses at the point of sale, on an iPad sitting next to the register. Given the troubles my clients have run into when trying to collect addresses in their brick and mortars, this is definitely a product whose time has come.

Venkat talks about a few anti-spam cases making their way through California courts and how the courts seem to be siding with the plaintiffs recently.

On the lawsuit front, John Levine posts about peacefire.org losing an anti-spam case due to the Gordon v. Virtumundo case.

ReturnPath and Liveclicker have partnered to bring video to email. I know marketers are all for video in email, but I can’t get excited about it. I read fast and videos always seem to take to long to watch. I don’t have a feel, though, for how much the average email recipient wants video in their mailbox.

Stephanie Miller from ReturnPath has a summary of a talk given by representatives from Hotmail and Yahoo at the Email Insider’s Summit sponsored by Mediapost. Both ISPs emphasized the need for senders to engage their recipients.

priority number one is to make sure that only messages that are welcome and valued by end user subscribers reach the inbox.

The secret to email marketing: send mail people want to receive.

One of his commenters follows up with a long comment about how recipients shouldn’t get angry when they get unsolicited email from a company they have interacted with.

We decide who we think may want to hear from us. The decision is not scientific, we just look at their profile and add them if we see fit. If someone in Sales gets a contact name and someone in Marketing ends up contacting that person, we’ve usually done our homework and know a bit about why we’re attempting to contact said person.

Fundamentally, though, it’s not about the sender. It’s all about the recipient.

It’s certainly possible that the company above actually considers the recipient and really are trying to send mail only to those folks who want it. But, the vast majority of companies who preach “opt-out” aren’t putting that much time or thought into the decision of whether or not to send mail to a particular recipient. If they get an email address, they add that address to marketing lists and commence sending mail.

One to one mail is OK and can be done on an opt-out basis. This is particularly true when a potential customer gives you an email address and asks for more information. But bulk email on an opt-out basis quickly overwhelms the recipient and their mailbox. An overflowing mailbox does not lead to receptive customers. Respect your contacts, respect their time and their space and don’t add them to newsletters or email marketing lists without their permission.

I’m sorry, but you don’t get to decide that. And by “you” I mean businesses. Businesses and their marketing departments who look at email as a fast, convenient way to reach a lot of people with their very important messages.

Now for the purposes of this discussion I’ll make some definitions clear. I’m not talking about the kind of spam that botnets send out to try and trick people into buying fake pharmaceutical goods or a counterfeit watch.

I’m talking about UCE – unsolicited commercial email. The kind of email you get when a company decides to add you to their marketing newsletter without you ever requesting it, and without a double opt-in process. The law might say this isn’t spam, but every customer I talk to says it is. And guess who gets to decide that? The customer does.

There is more than a grain of truth in there. Recipients have more influence in the spam / not-spam decision than senders do. Even if a sender is complying with CAN SPAM, recipients may still call the mail spam. And if the recipients tell their ISP, their spam filtering company or their mail client that the mail is spam then the sender may lose access to that recipient. If enough recipients tell an ISP mail is spam, then the sender loses access to all recipients at that ISP.

This shift in influence to the receivers means that senders need to remember that keeping recipients happy is a critical part of any successful email marketing program. Senders that annoy their recipients lose access to those recipients and their wallets.

Over on the Unica blog, Len Shnyeder interviews Annalivia Ford who is a new member of their email operations team. She has had many years of experience in dealing with senders from the receiver position. She summarizes successful delivery as follows:

the bottom line really is simple, if not easy: to succeed, marketers must send timely, relevant and desired email to an engaged audience. I promise that spammers are not doing that.

Scott Cohen continues his email snob interview series by interviewing Al Iverson. The whole interview is worth a read, as Al has been around a long time and has been deep in the trenches on both sides of the delivery equation. Al sums up the essentials of email delivery in two short paragraphs.

If you want to stay in the inbox forever, your practices have to keep getting better. The ISPs stack rank everybody sending them marketing email, and knock the bottom senders out. Eventually, you’ll be that bottom sender; don’t wait for them to get to you. Keep improving!

I get upset when people ask me how close to the line they can be before they will be in trouble. If that’s the question they’re asking, they’re thinking about it wrong. Instead, they need to think about how to embody best practices in a way that obviates the need for periodic remediation. Walk the right path and you’re not going to have to pause periodically because you got blocked due to complaints.

Both interviews have good information and are a must read for any email marketers.