It’s a good read, and I strongly encourage everyone to go give it a look.

But his post led me to a post by Andrew Kordek at Trendline where he claims that there is an industry rule of thumb that says 6 months is the rule of thumb to define an inactive.

Wait, What?

I know there’s a huge amount of controversy in the email space about whether or not you should purge inactive addresses. I know there are some very vocal people who think that removing inactive addresses is tantamount to marketing suicide. But where did 6 months come from? Who made it an industry standard?

If we don’t know where the standard came from, if we don’t know why we’re doing it then what kind of mickey mouse industry are we running here?

There is a lot about email marketing that is empirical. You poke the black box on one side and see what happens on the other. The problem with that is, that we can “discover” a lot of effects that aren’t real, but somehow turn into “you must do this!”

I have no doubt there are times when a 6 month expiry is a good idea. A number of my clients over the last few years use a much, much shorter time because that’s what works for them. I also know there are times when longer expiry times are a good idea, too.

It’s really important that when you’re making decisions about your email marketing program that you don’t mindlessly apply “standards” to what you’re doing. Think about the practical effects of your decisions and put them in context with your overall business plan.

To do otherwise is to kneecap your email marketing program.

We will no longer certify mail streams which are strictly comprised of “third-party marketing” email (e.g., email-based advertising that is not accompanied by content and is sent on behalf of a different company than the one to which the end user subscribed in the first place).

The changes are, I think, a reflection of where access to the mailbox is headed. Third party marketing is really mail that recipients can take or leave. They may open or click through the occasional email, they may even make a purchase from a particular email. But the overall mail stream is not something they care about. If the mail shows up and it’s something they’re interested in, that’s great and they’re happy. But if the mail doesn’t show up, they don’t miss it and they’re still happy.

This is the crux of what  talking about when we use the term engagement. Engagement is a measure of how much your mail is missed when it doesn’t show up.

Return Path, and the ISPs, and the anti-spam filtering companies are all about making sure users get the mail they want. But if the user doesn’t actively want a particular email, if they don’t miss it when it’s not in their inbox, then they’re not engaged with the mail.

These are exactly the changes I, and others, predicted at the beginning of 2010. No longer are ISPs focusing on stopping mail that users complain about, now they’re looking at enhancing the inbox experience. The key to that is delivering the mail that users are very happy to receive.

If the ISPs would just tell us what they want us to do, we’ll do it.

The ISPs have told senders what they want them to do. They want senders to stop sending mail that their users don’t want. It is a very simple statement.

Stop sending spam.

For many senders, however, it’s not enough. “Tell us exactly what we need to do to stop sending spam. What complaint rates must we be under? What bounce rates do we have to be under? How do you want us to do this?” By this point in the conversation the ISP person is mentally rolling their eyes and looking for a way to escape the conversation.

The ISPs don’t want to tell senders how to behave, they want senders to start behaving. Stop sending spam should be all they need to tell senders.

Senders who ask for ISPs to tell them how to stop sending mail recipients think is spam are looking for specific thresholds they can stay under. They’re not really interested in actually sending wanted mail, they’re interested in sending good-enough mail, where good-enough mail is simply mail that gets to the inbox.

Want to know why ISPs don’t think much of many senders? Because the senders are not visibly taking any stand against abuse. I know there are a lot of senders out there who stop a lot of spam from ever leaving their systems, but there’s also a lot of unwanted mail that goes out, too. Some of that mail is even spam by any definition of the word. All the ISPs can see is the spam that gets through, and then they hear just tell us what to do and we’ll do it. From an ISP perspective, this means the senders only care about the thresholds and getting in under the ISPs’ radars.

Senders need to take more responsibility for the mail that goes out over their networks.

What do I mean by this? I mean senders need to stop waiting for the ISPs to define good practices. Senders need to implement standards and good practices just because they’re good practices, not because the ISPs are dictating the practices. Senders need to stop customers from doing bad things, and dump them if they won’t stop. Senders need to stop relying on ISPs for specific answers to why mail is being blocked. Senders need to take responsibility for the mail going across their networks.

It’s time for senders to grow up and stop relying on others for guidance. They shouldn’t implement good practices just because the ISPs tell them to, but instead should implement good practices because they are good practices.

Microsoft did reply to the FixOutlook.org campaign on the MSDN Developer blog. The money quote, which they bolded for emphasis in the original post:

There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability.

The thing is, if Microsoft had built a compliant HTML rendering engine into Word, it wouldn’t matter which subset the Outlook developers wanted to implement, everything would all render correctly.

This point was more eloquently made by the Email Standards Project in their reply to Microsoft.

[W]e are in no way advocating that Microsoft shift from using Word to create or render HTML emails. We’re asking that the HTML produced by the Word engine be standards compliant. This in turn will ensure that the engine will correctly render standards-based emails.

As anyone who has attempted to export a Word document to HTML knows, the Word HTML engine is horribly non-compliant and generates HTML that even Internet Explorer renders wrong sometimes. There are a number of programs out there that convert Word HTML to W3C compliant, readable HTML. Sadly, Microsoft has never seemed to have any interest in writing a correct HTML engine for Word.

I’ve been thinking about this much of the morning, and considering Microsoft’s history with implementation of standards. Microsoft has never really followed many of the Internet standards. They adopt what they like, and create new “standards” that work with MS products. This has worked for them, given their position in the market. Companies and software developers that wanted to interoperate with Microsoft software had to comply with Microsoft, Microsoft never had to comply with them.

I find it extremely unlikely that this effort will cause Microsoft to deviate from their course. Based on Microsoft’s history, the solution is not for Microsoft to change rendering in Outlook, but for everyone else to change how they do things.

Mark Brownlow blogged on the topic, too, and makes another of his insightful points. Email marketers and email designers are not an important user group to Microsoft. Instead, they’re focused on the actual people who use Outlook to send and receive email.

Put your email user cap on. The vast majority of messages you consider truly important are nothing more than text and maybe the odd image or attachment. Mails from friends, family and work colleagues, and simple transactional emails.

Of course there will be exceptions, but the vast majority of “important” messages received by Outlook 2007 users look fine. A few bulk marketing emails may look a little weird as not everyone has adpated to the constraints imposed by Outlook 2007. But do these users care?

In my own case, I prefer emails that actually have useful content without images. My email client defaults to images off, and unless marketers put a little effort into giving me something useful without images, I’m not going to load images. Can’t bother to design something I can read? I’m not going to bother to click “load images” and read your mail. Look at these two mails I received this morning:

Can you guess which one I clicked through and made a purchase from?

I’m not going to tell you formatting isn’t important, because clearly it is. But formatting should take a back seat to content and relevancy. Window dressing isn’t going to engage users, content will engage users. A pretty email is just a pretty email. I useful and relevant email, now that’s something recipients want.

Make sure your mail doesn’t look anything like spam — not just in the text and formatting, but in all of your mailing practices.

Good advice, your mail will not be blocked if it does not look like spam. What kinds of things do I mean? Here are things that spammers do, that often non-spammers do as well.

Ignore bounces. One of the absolute quickest ways to get blocked is to keep sending mail to non-existent addresses. Purge your lists, make sure you are removing those addresses that will never deliver.

Hide contact information. Do not use a domain privacy service, put your real business address in your whois records.

Fake contact information. Do not use blatantly fake information in your domain registration. Register your actual business address. Do not use 555-xxxx phone numbers.

Use free or very low cost vendors. Do not use free or advertising supported vendors for your webhosting, mail hosting, or DNS. Geocities hosted webpages, mydyndns.org hosted name servers, freemail addresses (aim, gmail, hotmail, yahoo addresses), these are ways spammers get around blocks.

Shift IP addresses. If you get an IP address blocked, for any reason, do not just start mailing from another IP. Figure out what the problem is and fix it. Skipping around blocks is what spammers do.

Mail from many different places. Do not send emails from a diverse set of IP addresses located all over the world. Spammers spread their sending out in order to dilute their spam metrics to avoid threshold based blocks. They have done this so often there is even a term for it: snowshoeing.

Use bad HELO values. Many botnets and spam infected windows machines use badly formatted or incorrect HELO values. Use a fully qualified domain name, in your domain, for a HELO value.

Use generic rDNS. Set a reverse DNS value for your IPs that does not contain the IP address or otherwise look programatically assigned.

Use incorrect HTML. Spammers hide text and use fake HTML tags in order to avoid content filters. Consequently, filters check HTML against the HTML specification.

Send different HTML and text in multipart/alternative email. In addition to using badly formatted and fake HTML, spammers put drastically different text in the text portion of HTML emails. Filters check for this and if too many differences between email parts makes mail look like spam.

Send no text part in HTML email. Spammers do this to avoid the above two filters. Do this and you look no different than they do.

Use multiple corporate identities. If you have separate divisions or brands that is one thing, but often spammers set up completely separate companies and conceal the relationship between those companies.

All of these things are spammer tactics meant to confuse, fool, deflect and avoid filtering mechanisms.

How many of them does your company do?

There is one major change that deserves its own discussion. Yahoo is now using the SBL, XBL and PBL to block connections from listed IP addresses. These are public blocklists run by Spamhaus. Each of them targets a different type of spam source.

The SBL is the blocklist that addresses fixed spam sources. To get listed on the SBL, a sender is sending email to people who have never requested it. Typically, this involves email sent to an address that has not opted in to the email. These addresses, known as spamtraps, are used as sentinel addresses. Any mail sent to them is, by definition, not opt-in. These addresses are never signed up to any email address lists by the person who owns the email address. Spamtraps can get onto a mailing list in a number of different ways, but none of them involve the owner of the address giving the sender permission to email them.

Additionally, the SBL will list spam gangs and spam supporters. Spam supporters include networks that provide services to spammers and do not take prompt action to remove the spammers from their services.

The XBL is a list of IP addresses which appear to be infected with trojans or spamware or can be used by hackers to send spam (open proxies or open relays). This list includes both the CBL and the NJABL open proxy list. The CBL list machines which appear to be infected with spamware or trojans. The CBL works passively, looking only at those machines which actively make connections to CBL detectors. NJABL lists machines that are open proxies and open relays.

The Policy Block List (PBL) is Spamhaus’ newest list. Spamhaus describes this list as

The Spamhaus PBL is a DNSBL database of end-user IP address ranges which should not be delivering unauthenticated SMTP email to any Internet mail server except those provided for specifically by an ISP for that customer’s use. The PBL helps networks enforce their Acceptable Use Policy for dynamic and non-MTA customer IP ranges.

PBL IP address ranges are added and maintained by each network participating in the PBL project, working in conjunction with the Spamhaus PBL team, to help apply their outbound email policies.

Additional IP address ranges are added and maintained by the Spamhaus PBL Team, particularly for networks which are not participating themselves (either because the ISP/block owner does not know about, is proving difficult to contact, or because of language difficulties), and where spam received from those ranges, rDNS and server patterns are consistent with end-user IP space…

Generally, email service providers and bulk senders only need to be concerned about the SBL. Being listed on the SBL is a sign that your subscription processes allow addresses to be subscribed by people who do not own those addresses. Removal from the SBL involves fixing subscription processes and verifying that all recipients do actually want to receive your email.

Generally ESPs and bulk senders should not be listed on either the XBL or the PBL. I am aware of a couple cases where senders were listed on the XBL, but in all these cases there was a Windows machine inside the company infected with a trojan sending spam. Once the machine was cleaned, the listing was removed promptly. Senders listed on the PBL should talk to their ISP for resolution.

According to their bounce message, Comcast is using ReturnPath’s proprietary SenderScore product to filter mail. Reports on thresholds vary, but IPs with SenderScores of 70 and below have been blocked with messages similar to:

Remote host said: 554 IMTA06.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net comcast
10.01.01.01 Comcast BL009 Blocked for spam. Please see
http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=SecurityMail_Policy19053

In addition to blocking based on SenderScore, Comcast also appears to be blocking based on complaints from their users. Comcast is testing a feedback loop. I have heard from one FBL user that there are some kinks to work out, but that the FBL provider is working with them to resolve the problems.

This new process is a complete change from the previous way Comcast handled email blocking. Previously they were primarily using Brightmail to filter spam from their mail stream, now they are using complaints to identify bad mail. During the the transition mailers are seeing an increase in blocked email.

There are solutions. Use the forms Comcast directs you to use when they reject your mail. If there are extensive problems, talk to your delivery monitoring company or your delivery consultant. Most of us have the ability to escalate issues and talk to people internal to ISPs in order to determine if there is some specific problem and what you can do about it. But, don’t panic, Comcast doesn’t hate you, in fact, I expect these changes are going to better for everyone in the long run.

If spamhaus can create their own list of what Spam is or isn’t, Then what is to stop us applying this rule in the real world. A joy rider can carry a mission statement declaring that in his terms car theft is ok (a over the top compression but does give the idea).

First off, I do not agree that what happens online is somehow not real. Sure, on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog, but the Internet is real. It is a place where people meet, form communities, interact, make purchases, play, work, research and hundreds of other things. I’ve personally made connections over the Internet that have resulted in a lot of real world things, including friendships, jobs and job offers, this company and even my marriage.

Secondly, I think his analogy is flawed. In my opinion, Spamhaus is not in the position of the joy rider. Rather, they are more like the private security company hired by a group of people to patrol an area and interrupt joy riders as they are stealing cars. The security company has no authority to create laws and cannot arrest or detain someone who might be a criminal. Their job is as a presence and deterrence. They enforce the standards of the communities using their services.

Of course, my analogy is not completely accurate, either. Spamhaus does set standards for what IP addresses they list. Companies that use Spamhaus, and other blocklists, endorse those standards when they use the blocklist. Spamhaus’ users trust Spamhaus’ judgment on what IP addresses are sending spam. If Spamhaus or other blocklists do not exhibit good judgement and are too aggressive in their listings, then receiver sites will not use them.

Spamhaus has set their standards for listing as “unsolicited bulk email.” Their userbase clearly supports this standard, if the SBL started blocking email that users wanted, then people would stop using the SBL. If people stop using the SBL, then it loses the ability create standards.