Email Ethics

New postmaster website at cox

2009-11-11T19:12:00.003+01:00

Cox.net just released their new postmaster website.
It is as always full of useful information about best practices to successfully deliver to cox hosted emails and a list of SMTP errors among other cool stuff.

The website is available here

CSI: Emailing

2009-11-03T20:44:00.008+01:00

As in Miami, Las Vegas or Manhattan, experts investigate in email marketing to identify malicious activities.
While the CSI experts in the TV show use DNA and fingerprints to get to the murderer, the CSI email marketing spam filters identify spam sources according to sending IP and sending domain.

As someone with no fingerprints nor DNA would be suspicious (or even not living actually) in the eyes of the CSI experts, spam filters ask for a minimum of identifying features to treat you as a regular and honest email broadcaster.

Let's list them once more so everyone is up to pace with it:
SPF, DomainKey and the newly used DKIM.
All this information MUST be found in the DNS settings of your sending domain, failure to provide this information will place you on the suspicious side of the incoming emails.

But, as any other identification process, it has its down side:
If you are a clean, best practices compliant sender, it will open many doors for your emails, if you are more of a dark side of the force kind of email sender, your reputation will probably cost you big time.

This leads me quite naturally to the point I wanted to make today:
When in real life, your fingerprints and DNA can identify you among millions in a good or in a bad way, the traffic incoming from your sending IP(s) and sending domain will be monitored, analysed and kept in the records to put you in a box: good or bad. Don't spoil it all.

Of course some might argue that it's possible to broadcast with a shared set of IPs and shared sending domain, yes it is but do not dare believe you can fool CSI experts so easily (especially Grissom), the links inside your email can also tell on you and to be honest, would you really want to share your reputation with a stranger?

Canadian Anti-Spam Act (a.k.a. Bill C-27) update.

2009-10-31T10:53:00.004+01:00

The canadian Anti-Spam Act discussed several times on this blog recently, has passed committee review and was referred back to the Canadian House of Commons, intact, at 17:30 Monday.
It should now be quite soon that the Canadian people have their own anti-spam bill.

Here are two posts on my blog discussing the subject:
Canada to pass an anti-spam act
Canada towards an anti-spam act

If you want to learn more about the background of this law and its upcomming challenges, I advise you to read Matt's post on EmailKarma.

Spam me please

2009-10-30T11:59:00.002+01:00

Hello all,

I'm currently analyzing spam and how it reaches our inboxes.
I am also checking the way users are protected by ISPs.
To do so, I have created several emails that I post on the web to see how spammed they will be according to where they are posted or registered.

Please note this is not a benchmark I'm doing, it's just to get some information and a better understanding of spam propagation.

Here's the list of 'honeypots':
antonbook@orange.fr
antonbook@live.com
antonchecking@yahoo.com
antonchecking@gmail.com
onlineposting@antonbook.otherinbox.com

New look for the blog

2009-10-29T16:38:00.003+01:00

Hello all,
It was finally time to change the look and feel of the blog.
The update is now over, there might be a few tweaks to be made in the following days but nothing major.
I hope you like it as it is now :-)

Responsys Acquires Smith-Harmon Inc.

2009-10-29T15:23:00.003+01:00

Let's continue with the series of events in the 'small' world of ESPs, Responsys just announced they bought Smith-Harmon.
Responsys is known to be a global provider of on-demand marketing solutions on email, web, print, mobile, and social media channels.
Founded in 1998 the acquisition will help Responsys "strengthen the company's ability to help marketing organizations with the strategic planning, creative design, and execution of integrated, cross-channel marketing programs."

Sherpa knowledge for all

2009-10-29T11:18:00.003+01:00

Marketing Sherpa jsut released their new Email marketing benchmark report for 2010.

This report contains a lot of very useful information, including an entire Chapter dedicated to "Email Economics in a Recessionary Economy".

I can only advise you to download this - free - report on the sherpastore and to read it thoroughly.

New ESP in France

2009-10-28T19:05:00.005+01:00

ContactLab, an Italian ESP just opened an office in Paris, France.

Well implanted in Italy it's a big challenge for this company attacking a market where ESPs are already numerous and well implanted (Cabestan, Experian CheetahMail, Emailvision and eCircle just to name a few).

Let's see how this new pure player can get hold of pieces of the French cake.

As I speak about ContactLab, let's mention their latest study the 2009 E-mail Marketing Consumer Report which is available in several languages including English.
The report is available here

Canada towards an anti-spam Act

2009-10-24T12:02:00.003+02:00

I already talked about this back in February on a blog post called Canada to pass an anti-spam act.
The first elements of this act have been discussed this week in Standing Committee Meeting which will reconvene on Monday.
It is good to hear that Canada (last of the G8 countries not to have an anti-spam act) is speeding up.

More information is available on CakeMail's blog and Retunrpath's blog

IBM + Outblaze = Lotuslive iNotes

2009-10-14T23:34:00.003+02:00

IBM bought back in April Outblaze's messaging assets, they are now launching Lotuslive iNotes, a new email service.
The new postmaster and abuse emails are both @lotuslive.com.

No changes yet to the Outblaze services (Feedback Loops, email hosting,...) but it's likely that at some point a lot of things will be merged.

Talking about feedback loops, those already registered to Outblaze's FBL will start receiving feedback from the lotuslive domain (on the fblbounce@fbl.mail.lotuslive.com email).

A dedicated FBL program will probably soon be available (and will then be added to my list of available feedback loops).

Postini down (again)

2009-10-14T11:07:00.005+02:00

Computerworld made a post talking about yesterday's troubles on Postini protected emails.
Apparently some emails were blocked when they shouldn't have and all mails (or close to) were delayed.

The issue impacted mainly U.S. accounts.

This probably had an impact on yesterday's email marketing campaigns broadcasted on Gmail (but not only) domains.

You can read the original post here

Returnpath's gloomy and scary tale for halloween

2009-10-13T21:42:00.002+02:00

A very nice post on returnpath's blog tells us about an old blacklist (blacklist.us), left for dead but with its IPs re-attributed to someone else who, fed up of receiving still lots of queries for the blacklist has set it to reply the IP is listed on all queries!

I can only advise you to read the post, enjoy

The FTC approves Adobe's deal to buy Omniture

2009-10-07T18:15:00.003+02:00

What a week for the e-marketing world!
After Experian who buyed United MailSolutions last week, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission approved Adobe Systems's deal to buy web the analytics firm Omniture for $1.7 billion ($21.50 per share).

This deal is supposed to help measure web activity on flash websites.

More (economical) information on the Reuters website

Internet ad revenues are going down for the first half of '09

2009-10-06T17:41:00.003+02:00

The IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) just released a study on their website about Internet Ad revenues for the first half of 2009.

If the Internet ad revenues ($10.9 billion) are going down by 5.3% versus the same period last year, the decrease (blamed on the economic crunch) is less important than on any other media around.

For more information you can download the report here

Experian buys United MailSolutions GmbH

2009-10-05T15:03:00.004+02:00

Experian continues it's shopping among European ESPs, the latest: United MailSolutions (former Falk MailSolution), a german ESP, they just bought for an undisclosed sum.

We can probably imagine it will have a great impact on the German market (mainly).

For more information you can read the official press release (Date 01-Oct-09).

It's not the first time Experian buys a "local" ESP to gain shares of the market, they already bought EmailingSolution a couple of years ago to grow CheetahMail to the French and Spanish markets (being back then "only" operating in the USA, England, Ireland and the Netherlands.

Spamhaus and snowshoe spammers

2009-10-03T23:47:00.004+02:00

A very interesting post has been made on wordtothewise on Spamhaus' new black list.

This blacklist is supposed to identify spammers using their own (instead of compromised) IPs to send out spam.
Of course we are talking about a huge number of IPs there.

The post explains fully the concept of snowshoe spammer and the new blacklist's principle.

Very interesting blog post, a "must read" as I reckon.

Q3'09 Spam & Virus Trends from Postini

2009-10-02T11:38:00.000+02:00

Google posted today the Q3'09 Spam and virus trends as monitored by Postini.

There's a lot of interesting information.
Among other data, there is a link to Postini's best practices to optimize the spam filtering.

The post is available on the Google Enterprise Blog:
Q3'09 Spam & Virus Trends from Postini

Email marketing is like a night out in a club!

2009-09-24T20:48:00.003+02:00

Let's think about it, sending an email and having the receiver to transform is a little bit like going out in a club to score.
Let me just call my email John.

John wants to score.
He is in his apartment downtown and is dressing up. If he wants to score he probably has to dress as well as possible to be the more attractive possible. This is the creative.

Once ready he heads to the club, this is the broadcast.

If he arrives there without any incident (delivery) he gets in the line outside the club and wait for his turn.

Then he gets to go through the bouncer (the spam filter) who will let him go in if:
1 - he matches the dress code (Tidy HTML)
2 - he never went in a fight in the club or got thrown out (Reputation)
3 - He isn't drunk and talking crap (content scan)

When he gets in (inbox) he spots a good looking girl he likes ifhe already knows her, she's a client, else, she's a prospect.

He gets close to her and then throw his pick up line (subject line). There are several types of pick up lines:
1 - If you lie about yourself, it's a scam
2 - If you are too mysterious, you might loose her attention
3 - If yo are too long you might be boring.
In a few words, your subject line needs to be as good as your pick up lines: short, punchy and interesting.

If the girl gets in the discussion with John, then he got a click, but there's a lot more to do to score.

He has to try to keep the discussion live and interesting and to gather as much information about the girl so he knows what she likes, what she wants,... that's web analytics.
The interesting thing here is that even if he doesn't score right away with that girl, the more information he will get here, the more likely he is to score on a later night when they get to meet again.

As I see it, email marketing is like trying to score with hundreds, thousands of persons in one go.

Don't mix up towels and dishcloths

2009-09-16T17:33:00.003+02:00

This French saying is so true when it comes to email marketing !
If you own a database that you use to communicate with your clients and then all of a sudden, you plan to rent it, then it's probably one of the worst ideas ever to broadcast it on the same environment as usual (by environment I mean IPs and broadcasting domain or email mainly).

I recall a presentation I attended in Madrid where the hotmail representative explained that transactional emails shouldn't be broadcasted on the same IPs as the newsletter.
I do not agree 100% on this, I tend to believe that if your optin process is clean and that you treat your subscribers with care, the Newsletter shouldn't jeopardize your transactional emails' deliverability. On the contrary, transactional emails could slightly improve your overall (already good) reputation.

BUT, when it comes to sending information to your clients on one hand and sending advertising on the other: YOU HAVE TO SEPARATE BOTH.

According to measures I made roughly on my client's broadcasts, complaint rates are twice as high.

Advertising for your brand and advertising for a third party company are two different things and as such are percieved differently by your subscribers.

Why take the risk?

Mail.com not handled by Outblaze anymore?

2009-09-15T18:07:00.004+02:00

All of you email marketers out there who know Outblaze (and about email deliverability), know how harsh they are on filtering incoming emails.
Up to recently, mail.com was managed by Outblaze. Laura from the "Word to the Wise" blog noticed some changes on the MX settings of mail.com, now pointing to AOL.

This will probably lead to a lot of changes on the way emails are received or filtered on @mail.com addresses.

You can read the original post here

New feedback loops at returnpath (Tucows)

2009-09-12T13:55:00.002+02:00

Returnpath just announced on their blog that they released a new feedback loop for Tucows.
This feedback loop have been added to the Email-Ethics list of feedback loops.

I also added the Rackspace feedback loop to the list.

Tele2.fr : it's done now!

2009-09-09T18:33:00.003+02:00

As mentioned on a post I made in June on this blog to announce the end of the tele2.fr domain, tele2.fr email addresses stopped working a couple of days ago. The smtp error message received when sending to this domain now is:
571, [ prohibited. We do not relay]

You can now get rid of all tele2.fr email addresses still inside your DB.

Do not mail these domain names

2009-09-04T09:46:00.004+02:00

Thanks to Robomail, I discovered a list of domains which clients are usually on cell phones, it is very important (even more than usual) not to send unsolicited emails to emails which domain is on this list.
The list is available (and updated) on the FCC website
You can download it here.
For more information you can also read this List of anti-spam laws article

Disposable email addresses list update

2009-08-27T10:34:00.002+02:00

Hello there!

Just a short post to tell all of you I've updated the list of disposable email addresses domain list.

You can read it on the DEA - disposable email list page

Enjoy :)

Lightning never strikes twice the same place... or does it?

2009-08-08T23:51:00.004+02:00

Funny thing, I made a post this week dealing with how important e-marketing could become in Africa in the next years, in my plane back to Paris I read an article in a Tunisian newspaper emphasizing the increase in internet accesses in Tunisia and the road that has still to be walked to reach the other countries.

Here are a couple of figures for 2009 out of the article (reminder: Tunisia has 10M inhabitants).
- Number of internet users: 3M (+40% compared to last year)
- Number of people having a personal DSL connexion: 280k (+95.2% compared to last year!!!)
- Number of Tunisian websites : 8 727 (in june - not counting personal web pages and blogs) (+34% compared to last year).

Another interesting figure is that out of these 10M inhabitants, there is 8.66M GSM lines.

Proof?