I’ve been working on more Spamhaus cases lately (apparently, as Laura points out, so is everyone else). I’m not unhappy about that. I actually love doing policy enforcement work. I find it challenging and stimulating. But, I’m starting to notice some patterns.

For instance, I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that the People Who Matter are getting better at finding append lists and are more than willing to punish marketers for using them. And, of course, no one listened, except for maybe people who were already avoiding using append services.

Well, folks, the stats don’t lie. Some back of the hand scribbling using data that only goes back to the last three months of last year, tells me that my employer suffered from an average of between 1 and 2 SBLs per month in 2011. Using those numbers, that would be a max of 24 listings in 2011. (And, I think there were a couple of months last year when nothing came in at all.) We have already surpassed that number for 2012, and the year is not quite half done. So, Spamhaus is certainly taking notice of more things being sent by the clients of ESPs. Of the stats for just this year, roughly 20% of the SBL listings that we’ve dealt with have, in some form, involved email appends. That’s about double the number cases involving data purchases, and is roughly the same number of incidents as those involving errors in data compilation. And that’s only what we know about. There could be more.

So, why do I feel like beating my head against my desk, crying in my hands, and beating it against a wall? Because the stats tell me that people either aren’t listening to the warnings or they think that I’m daft and/or lying. So, they’re still out there doing stupid things — and getting caught. When they get caught, they all try to act innocent as though it isn’t their fault that they did something that is resulting in a lot of mail getting blocked. And they act incredulous that Spamhaus has the juice to force action, or that we would enforce our policy that prohibits the use of purchased and appended lists.

Why would we enforce our policy? Because that’s what you do, if you want to be successful. My current estimate is that a Spamhaus listing will result in between 60 and 70% of a B2C list getting blocked. You cannot be unable to deliver that much mail and remain successful.

And that brings us to the question in the title of this post: Why does all of this matter?

It’s easy to say that all of this matters because it’s the right thing to do. And that’s certainly true, but there are far more practical reasons why it matters: It matters because it has an impact on our clients who cannot afford to bounce between 60% and 70% of their mail today because they insist on using append with the excuse of “it’s made us a lot of money in the past.” It matters because the concepts of “permission” and “consent” actually matter to the people who exercise some level of control over what messages are accepted for delivery and where those messages get sent.

An overview of online marketing. A simple graph that represents the major components of online marketing, including, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), including RSS and Atom feeds, Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Viral Networking/Blogs and Social Netowrking. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today’s post comes from Richard Bewley. He’s a deliverability expert in ExactTarget’s London office. Since I’m at ET as well, we sometimes get the opportunity to work together and I’ve found him to be pretty solid in the advice that he gives clients and thought that you might enjoy his insight.

So, without further ado, take it away, Richard!

“I am not a spammer – so why have I been blocked?”

Well, as the saying goes, ‘that depends’. In recent weeks, I have certainly experienced a rise in cases of legitimate senders being blocked, notably by the Spamhaus SBL. For those who have so far been insulated from the pain that it such a listing, there is sadly a day when this could just happen to you.

A Spamhaus SBL block is about as effective at preventing email from reaching the intended receiver as a rock slide is at closing a road.

Be prepared!

Historically, my professional background has predominantly been working client side in a technical marketing capacity – I can genuinely empathise with the challenges in play which email marketers are faced with on a regular basis.

In one role a few years ago, I was instructed to email a woefully inactive portion of my employer’s database, and alarm bells rung immediately.

In a not untypical scenario where data is considered king, multiple thousands of legitimate opted-in records were magically discovered when migrating to a new ecommerce platform. The previous platform’s developer admitted that the query to bring across email addresses to the ESP was inherently broken, and had been for a number of years. Of course the business owners were livid – their entire business mode was built on expensive yet opted in customer acquisition at point of sale, and would see profit via email retention campaigns. In their shoes, I would feel exactly the same.

I put up so much resistance to this idea that I expected to be shown the door by the business owners. The reason was simple – I genuinely cared for their brand’s deliverability. More to the point, I wanted to protect their reputation knowing how business critical the email channel is to them.

The questions I had to ask at the time were:

So how long have we not been emailing to them?

How old is a lapsed record, and at what age should a line be drawn in the sand to be considered too risky?

How do we know that the email address is even valid?

Is it SPAM, as they are our customers who opted in to hear from us, yet have never even received a basic welcome mailing?

What I did next in terms of managing this situation is not the point of this missive, but more an awareness of how hard I know it can be for email marketers to build resistance to potentially catastrophic strategies decided upon by stakeholders who really do not understand the damage it could do. Whilst size isn’t everything supposedly, list size seems to be still deemed the all engrossing KPI which trumps all other metrics in email marketing.

Unfortunately, the definition of ‘SPAM’ in the minds of many of the more traditional marketers I have spoken to still seems to conjure up images of promoting: male enhancement pharmaceuticals; get rich quick schemes; phishing attacks, and the like. Spamhaus’s definition, however is far less focussed on content type:

Spamhaus’s anti-spam blocklist, the SBL, used by more than 1 Billion Internet users, is based on the internationally-accepted definition of Spam as “Unsolicited Bulk Email”. Therefore anyone sending UBE on the Internet, regardless of whether the content is commercial or not, illegal or not, is a sender of spam – and thus a spammer.

Email receivers are so efficient at weeding out the traditional spam that their attention is being turned to the bulk newsletters you keep sending them but they do not engage with at all. Week after week, sometimes even month after month. Look at Gmail’s Priority Inbox or Hotmail’s sweep, just for starters.

So I guess the next question is, what is ‘solicited’? In a recent meeting with a client who inadvertently mailed to 500,000 records who had potentially not been communicated to for up to 5 years, the rebuttal was ‘marketing opt-in’, so it was legally considered ‘safe’.

In another situation, the criteria of who would be targeted was even woollier, more along the lines of ‘has not unsubscribed = opted in’, and this is internally categorised as an ‘active’ subscriber. The difficulty by which a subscriber can be removed from their list (visit website you may have last used up to 5 years ago > remember the username and password > failing that have one sent/ reset and that actually being received in a timely manner) is a practise which insanely still goes on. Even if this is done, the record needs to be suppressed and flagged with the ESP – how robust is this solution?

I have heard, ‘we do not want to make it too easy for them to unsubscribe, in case this is done in error’. What is the answer then, quadruple opt-out? Phone-based unsubscription? Unsubscribe by postal service? DNA swab to prove ownership of address?

After analysing a client’s database, it was evident how unengaged subscribers really were. Over 80% had not opened or clicked in over 18 months, yet they will continue to be sent to. How many thousands of dollars are being spent to send to those who do nothing, and probably never will. Ever again. What about a reengagement campaign? Empowering the customer with a choice as to whether or not they want your missives in their inbox?

Do not forget, they can always opt-in again, should they choose to, but please give them a good reason to do so.

Finally, if ever you run into a similar situation as those described above when it comes to targeting inactives, just pay a little attention to the following:

Contact
Hampers
Unwanted
Registered
Newsletters

Or, CHURN for short. It is far cheaper not to send en masse to those who do not want to hear from you, than to face the music of the consequence of such actions.

These look less onerous than the ones published last year. For instance, the “within 2 clicks” part for unsubscriptions is now gone and replaced by “readily performed”. That’s going to be wildly squishy, and so most senders should probably go ahead and default to following CAN-SPAM’s still a bit squishy, but slightly more clear “single web page” requirement.

Image via Wikipedia

I’m sure that Dela has a smashing marketing program, but I keep hearing him say the things you’ve got in this article and that they’ll work “if you’re not doing anything stupid.” And he might even be right.

But, when I tell people the things that he doesn’t like for me to say, it’s well after they have been doing something stupid. Will what he says work in some or even many cases? Sure. If you’re not “doing something stupid” will hammering on “inactives” work for you? Only your data can tell you that.

But when there are already existing problems, Dela is like the guy who refuses to have his gangrenous arm amputated because he can’t imagine life without it.

Now, dear reader, please note that I’m limiting my comments to a certain realm: “they have been doing something stupid” and “already existing problems.” I think that a big part of Dela’s problem is that he gets to help his clients plan marketing, but he doesn’t help client fix delivery problems. His company leaves that to … well, people like me.

Here’s what Alchemy Worx, his company, says about their “delivery and deployment services“:

Our delivery and deployment services include data importing, data cleansing, de-duplication, filtering, targeting, testing and optimisation.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that there are people like Dela out there, helping clients who are doing things right to do them even better.

That said, Dela has issued me a challenge in a comment:

No one disagrees that it is a good idea to remove certifiably dead email addresses, but what email marketers really need help with is how to ensure that they are not culling people (prospects) who are happy to be on the list and plan to re-engage in future – what I call the unemotionally subscribed because of overhyping by the deliverability industry.

So rather than accusing me of stupidity by comparing me with someone who refuses to amputate a gangrenous limb, why don’t you help readers of this column by scoring email marketing practices by their impact on deliverability. For example on a scale of 1 to 10 is emailing inactives a 1 or a 10 (I would rate it a 2 at the most)? Authentication 1 or 10? Not removing addresses identified by feedback loops, 1 or 10?

Well, okay, then. Challenge accepted. But, first, let me lay down a couple of ground rules. 1) I’m going to measure things on a 1-10 scale where 1 will equate to “will get you blocked by administrators” and 10 will be “a great way to see your mail in the inbox”. I hope that is understandable since I tend to work in delivery repair rather than reputation maintenance. Thankfully, this means that we will hopefully stay well away from The Spock Trap.

Let’s start with the items that he has identified for us:

• Emailing Inactives: 5. Notice how this one sits in the middle. Some of it comes down to “how do you define ‘inactive’?” (which is the question that kicked off my post on The Difference Between Triage and Planning). If you already have a good program, then mailing inactives isn’t likely to hurt you much. On the other hand, 6 or 8 times per month I’ll see a client who is having their mail delivered to the bulk folder trim their sends back to their most highly engaged recipients and things start appearing in the inbox again. The reason why isn’t magical, it’s engagement. Incidentally, my advice at that point is that they can generally start incrementally adding inactives back in without too much danger.
• Authentication: 6. Part of the issue here will deal with target audience. The larger the domain that you are mailing, the more important that authentication is likely to be to them. Some, like Yahoo, won’t let you participate in their feedback loop programs unless you are authenticating your mail. But, many smaller domains, especially in the B2B realm still don’t do anything with authentication. Some providers, like Hotmail, will give your mail a small boost if you are authenticating mail using their preferred method. And almost all of the mid- to large-segment mailbox providers will penalize you for getting authentication wrong.
• Removing addresses identified by feedback loops: 10. If someone expresses a preference not to receive mail from you, then it’s best not to mail them, even if they did not use your preferred unsubscribe mechanism. Further, feedback loop data is used by providers to feed their reputation systems, which can result in bulk folder or blocking.

Now, let’s move on to some other things that he doesn’t mention.

• Using append: 2. Believe it or not, using email append is a quick way into bulk foldering and blocking. I have had ISP reps tell me that they are looking for signs of appending and really want to block it. There’s a reason why M³AAWG has a position statement saying that they’re against it, why CheetahMail has dropped it, and Fresh Address has moved to opt-in appends. Even if none of that were true, I pretty consistently see appended lists turn up with higher bounces, higher complaints, and higher subsequent bulk foldering and blocking.
• List purchasing: 1. As with appending, there is a distinct lack of permission. If someone does not give you their address, then they likely don’t want to hear from you via email.
• Paying attention to data early: 10. If you are flawlessly executing a marketing program but noticing that all of the metrics that you have have are going the wrong way, then paying attention to those metrics early on will likely save you from a discussion with someone like me down the line. And by paying attention to things and acting early, you have the added benefit of being able to plan your changes, rather than have someone start a triage process because you waited until things were an emergency.

Have questions about how I’d rate your practice? Leave a comment.

Related articles

• Cheetahmail on appending (wordtothewise.com)
• CheetahMail’s Stance Against email Appending (outwardmediablog.wordpress.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Today’s post is brought to you courtesy of the Republican Party of Maine. A Politico story indicates that the recent Maine caucuses had some votes that did not get counted because the emails with the vote tallies were caught in a spam filter.

Lessons learned:

1. It can happen to anyone, even with wanted, expected mail. These emails were expected to arrive on the night of the caucus, and the state party did want to know the results.
2. Spam filters cannot read someone’s mind. Spam filters use a series of rules to determine if an email is to be considered spam or not. These emails tripped those rules somehow, whether that was a result of the reputation of the mail sent by other people at their ISPs or due to the way the message was formatted, we don’t know. But the spam filter had to apply the same rules to those emails as it does to all other messages. The filter cannot intuitively know that today is somehow special.
3. Not everyone checks their spam folder. You might expect that state party officials would have checked the spam folder when they realized that not everything was in. But, like many other people out there, the spam folder is something that will get checked every few weeks — it is not part of their regular checking and viewing habits.

So, how do you plan for and work with those lessons?  Leave a comment!

For the last several months, I have been noticing an uptick in the numbers of people who are noticing that their mail is not getting though, and what is getting through is going into the bulk folder.  In the past couple of months we have also seen Spamhaus taking a greater notice and showing a greater willingness to list ESPs on its famous blocking list.

There are three things driving this:

1. Complaints. Believe it or not, people do complain about spam, they just don’t always do it to you. Rather they tell their providers that they don’t like what they’re seeing. Those complaints are factored into IP reputation metrics by some providers and a “fingerprint” of the message may be factored into content filtering.
2. Engagement. We’ve been saying for years that ISPs are taking notice of what their clients are doing with your mail. We are now seeing some pretty firm metrics that indicate that not getting rid of people who don’t care about your mail has a detrimental effect on your ability to deliver mail to the inbox. Now, I’m not saying that ISPs are tracking clicks, but recent experience indicates that continuing to mail people who are refusing to even view your messages has an impact over the medium to long terms.
3. Unclean lists. Who engages the very least with an email marketing campaign? People who never asked to be mailed in the first place. Using purchased, rented, or appended lists is a sure way to drive low engagement statistics and high complaint rates, for the perfect storm of points 1 and 2 to drive decreased delivery.  Right behind that is going to be assuming that permission lasts forever. Sometimes people don’t want mail anymore, so take some time to ask people who haven’t responded in a year or more if they still want to get your mail.

So, what does this mean? Simply that the space has to grow up. When you were a kid, you could run to mama and get her to make everything better. When you grew up some, mama started making you solve some of those problems yourself.  The same is true here: You can’t run to your ESP or an ISP and expect them to “make everything all better.”  They both expect you to take some responsibility for what you are sending and to whom you are sending it.

So, the next time that you have an issue, take some time first to examine what you are doing to minimize complaints and the use of unclean data, and what you are doing to drive engagement.  Take some responsibility for what you are doing. Your ROI, your ESP, your recipients, and their ISPs will all thank you for it.

I also think that this ties into recent discussions regarding whether “best practices” are actually the best things for folks to do on a regular consistent basis.  Consider this quote from Andrew’s article:

In addition, the general rule of thumb for X amount of time has long been 6 months.  Not sure who made that rule up or all of us (me included) who have used it as gospel over the last several years, but 6 months cannot be further from an industry standard.  There are so many factors that need to be looked at: seasonality, product mix, previous engagement metrics, time to inactivity, trending etc….that 6 months is no longer the standard.

I know who came up with that: it was someone who specialized in reputation repair.  The purpose of this “general rule of thumb” has nothing to do with reactivating subscribers and everything to do with quickly fixing a problem that was leading to loss of revenue.

This is the difference between triage and planning. I teach CPR and First Aid (something I’m qualified to do all the way up to Wilderness First Responder). In my more advanced classes, we study and apply the START algorithm to sorting victims in a multiple casualty event.  When you are engaged in triage using START, there are four possible outcomes for someone that you come across who is bleeding and breathing: Minor, Delayed, Immediate Care, and Deceased. All that triage is, then, is sorting your injured into one of those buckets.  You wait on helping the Minor and the Delayed cases.  You do what you can for the Immediate.  And you completely write-off the Deceased.

The first three buckets are the easy ones, it’s “Deceased” that’s hard to call.  That’s why, in most circumstances, we want doctors to do that.  And in our training slides, we look at one scenario when you have to label a 3 year old as deceased, even though he’s probably someone who could be saved. (And, for your peace of mind, we also point out that if resources become available, you should go back and try to save that one.)  But, everyone, no matter their age or socio-economic status, has to go into one of those buckets.

When you are dealing with a triage situation, everyone is hurt.  Everyone needs care.  And the care that everyone gets is not going to be the same level of care arrived at using the same decision trees that you would find if you were sitting in your doctor’s examination room receiving your annual physical.  When you are with your doctor in an exam room, you have time and access to long-term information that allows you to make more precise decisions.  When you’re laying out in the field, unconscious and bleeding, that luxury doesn’t exist.  The people providing first aid have to rely upon rules of thumb and treatment protocols and algorithms.

So, let’s apply that to email.  When you are experiencing good delivery it’s as though you are sitting in your doctor’s examination room — you can take the time to look at various strategies for subscriber reactivation.  You can consider factors like “is an inactive someone who hasn’t opened, or someone who hasn’t purchased.”

On the other hand, when you are not experiencing good delivery, when your sender reputation has tanked and you need to turn to someone like me (or my co-workers), then neither of us has the time to engage in an extended discussion about what an inactive subscriber might be.  This is a triage situation and you’re going to experience some loss as a result of allowing things to deteriorate to this point.  The people that you are working with to fix things are likely using rules of thumb and treatment protocols and algorithms — like “an inactive subscriber is someone who hasn’t opened or clicked in the last six months.”

When you hear about “best practices,” those are generally going to be the rules of thumb, the treatment protocols, and the algorithms that get used in triaging delivery problems.  They’re good for fixing problems, and represent a minimum level care that will generally “do no further harm.”  Just as the treatment decisions made out in a field are not likely to be the same (or even the most appropriate) decisions that could be made with time to reflect and make appropriate plans, following “best practices” are probably not always going to be the best decisions for you or your business.  But, when decisions need to be made now, you need to have something to turn to.

So, what is the takeaway from this?  It’s better to do things because you planned to do them than because you have to in order to stop the bleeding.  You have better (and more granular) options, along with the time to come up with a plan to accomplish what you’re hoping to do.

The 7th Circuit has issued its opinion in e360 Insight’s case against the Spamhaus Project. The award against Spamhaus was reduced to $3. That would be a dollar apiece for defamation, tortious interference with prospective economic advantage, and actual damages.

e360 appealed the verdict claiming that the discovery sanctions that Judge Kocoras imposed were unreasonable. While all of the things that laid the groundwork were going on, some people complained to me that this was all taking too long and that the judge was giving e360 too many chances. But, in its review of the discovery sanctions, the 7th Circuit said “…we weigh not only the straw that finally broke the camel’s back, but all the straws that the recalcitrant party piled on over the course of the lawsuit” (Slip Op. at 9) Every single one of those incidents were straws, and the 7th Circuit looked through them all before concluding “Thus, it is of little consequence whether, as e360 argues is the case here, the conduct that finally drew the district court’s ire can be explained away as a simple negligent mistake. A district court may conclude that one more supposed miscommunication is just another example of a party’s demonstrated inability to take his discovery obligations seriously” (Slip Op at 9, 10).

They continue:

Even more troubling are e360’s supplemental interrogatory responses. When e360 submitted those responses, it implied that its amendments were meant only to rectify defects in its previous responses. In actuality, however, e360 had drastically amended its previous responses. It added sixteen new witnesses, and it increased its damages estimate by a full order of magnitude.

Even setting aside e360’s previous discovery delays, these changes provided powerful evidence that e360 was not engaging in the discovery process in good faith. There is no way that e360 could have believed in good faith that its last-minute disclosure of so many new witnesses and a radically inflated damages estimate was even remotely appropriate, especially as part of its belated effort to comply with a court order compelling discovery. We cannot believe that e360 first learned of all this information in the two weeks between its initial, late, and inadequate responses to Spamhaus’s interrogatories on August 29, 2008, and its amended responses on September 12, 2008. All indications are that this late disclosure was meant to prolong discovery and inflict additional costs on Spamhaus by forcing it to request additional time to depose those witnesses and learn the details of the inflated new damage estimate. e360 only reinforces this suspicion by arguing to us that its failure to comply with the district court’s July order “could have been remedied by allowing Spamhaus to conduct any [additional] discovery it felt necessary.”

With this track record, no reasonable person could conclude that the district court’s sanctions were too severe.
(Slip Op. at 10, 11)

So, all of that stuff that everyone slogged through wasn’t for naught. This, my friends, was the pay off. And, for any attorneys reading this, perhaps a practice note should be that you don’t substantially change your interrogatory responses and claim that you’re just correcting a couple of defects. You lose credibility when you do that.

Also of significance, e360 appealed some rulings on the damages prove-up. First was the ruling that David Linhardt is not an expert and was unreliable as a witness. Much of this was based upon the constant flux in Linhardt’s damage estimates at trial and how that meant that (a) he wasn’t much of an expert and (b) wasn’t even reliable as a lay witness. e360 didn’t appear to say much about reliability issue, but instead turned on the ruling that he was not an expert. They agreed that he was a lay witness and argued that the district court should have allowed his testimony in because he was held to the wrong standard (since he’s not an expert, you see). The panel deftly sweeps that away by stating “e360’s argument misses the point. The district court gave Linhardt’s testimony no weight because he was not credible” (Slip Op. at 18).

Finally, the panel looks at the actual award. There, they decide that Judge Kocoras erred by granting damages based upon gross revenue rather than profit.

The real practice note for attorneys comes from the Conclusion:

By failing to comply with its basic discovery obligations, a party can snatch defeat from the jaws of certain victory. After our earlier remand, all e360 needed to do was provide a reasonable estimate of the harm it suffered from Spamhaus’s conduct. Rather than do so, however, e360 engaged in a pattern of delay that ultimately cost it the testimony of all but one witness with any personal knowledge of its damages. That lone witness lost all credibility when he painted a wildly unrealistic picture of e360’s losses. Having squandered its opportunity to present its case, e360 must content itself with nominal damages on each of its claims, and nothing more. We VACATE the judgment of the district court and REMAND this matter with instructions to enter judgment for the plaintiffs in the amount of three dollars.
Slip Op. at 22, 23

As Laura Atkins states, “that case may finally be over.”

Apparently, Spamhaus agreed with those folks, as SBL115700 appeared on August 15.  (Currently, it says that this is the “2nd listing in less than 30 days for spam from this IP”.)

There are, of course a lot of things to say about this course of action, but one that stands out above the others.  And I found the evidence this morning in my own mail reader.

The image that you see with this post (which links to a full size version) is taken from Thunderbird this morning, and it it shows you where and how this “opt-in” email arrived in my Gmail account.  That’s right, it showed up in my spam folder, where it has sat for the last three days, unopened and unread.

Unlike a lot of people, I do actually go through my spam folder and see what gets caught.  I just happened to see this in the midst of all of the counterfeit bag/(fake) Cialis/work at home scam/(bad) porn spam.  And, the penalty for not seeing what was in my spam folder would have been to receive more email.  And I could only hope at this point that Gmail would have tagged it all as spam and dealt with it so that I wouldn’t have had to.

The thing is, if I had complained about one of those emails, Penton would have told me that I had opted in to receive the mail because I hadn’t opted out. But, you see, I didn’t opt-in, I just never saw an opportunity to stop the mail preemptively.  And I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only one that this would have happened to.

That’s why a well-run opt-in campaign will mandate that the user take action to receive the mail.  That action can take place in a number of places ranging from “at the website where they are signing up” to “click here to receive these valuable offers that we’re just now getting ready to send you.”

Email is certainly one of those places where you cannot assume that silence is consent.