Annalivia Ford

Inbox secrets revealed!

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 21:42:00 +0000

My esteemed colleague and friend Laura Villevieille published a really cool discovery she made:

A couple of trail-blazing ISPs have made this data available to senders! Mail.ru has recently rolled out a new postmaster site that includes several of these dream metrics. QQ has also made some of this data available.

Mail.ru, operator of the largest Russian webmail provider and social networking sites, has just released a new postmaster website and feedback loop. The verification process is a bit more involved than other feedback loop programs, but the access it provides is well worth the effort!
The Mail.ru system allows us to see key deliverability metrics like “number of complaints” and percent delivered/blocked/spamfoldered”, and also provides several key engagement metrics: “number of messages read”, “number of messages deleted after being read” and “number of messages deleted unread”. All of this information is visible per sending domain by day, week or month and in a build-your-own chart allowing you to compare any of the metrics by week, month or year. How cool is that?!

Read the rest on IBM's SmarterCommerce blog!

Touting Schiermonnikoog

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:34:00 +0000

I wrote a blog post - maybe more of a photo collection, but it has some story in it too - of one of the most beautiful places I have ever been: one of the Dutch barrier islands, a national park called Schiermonnikoog. Have a look. See how lucky we are!

Bumpy Ride!

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:43:00 +0000

New blog post up on the Unica blog, discussing the changing face of email marketing. It seems I was right, as the recent experiences of a client of ours demonstrated to me.

Let me know what you think?

New: a "Coyote In The The Netherlands" post

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 20:55:00 +0000

It's spring. I can't help it. I wrote this. It has flowers, and Dutchness...and possible beavers. I also posted an excellent recipe for venison stew. Mmm, Bambi!

IT'S ALIVE!

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 21:01:00 +0000

Hijacking this space to announce the resuscitation of my Netherlands blog:

Wierd Dutch Town-Names Tour #1

Come explore Urk with us!

DMARC – What Is It & Do You Need It?

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:56:00 +0000

A lot of stuff has been flying around about DMARC. After discussing it with some of the folks that had a hand in creating it, I wrote a post to try and explain it in terms of what my clients may be thinking. It's over here on the IBM Unica blog.

Hope it helps!

Do they or don't they? Will they or won't they?

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:33:00 +0000

Ah, Christmas time! and the eternal question arises again: Do ISPs deliberately throttle senders over the holidays? My answer for this year is on the IBM Unica blog.

Don't Be That Guy - Make the Pie Higher!

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 09:55:00 +0000

Cross posted from the Unica IBM blog.

It’s that time of year again, when people are going to open their wallets and spend money on Christmas presents and retailers crank up their email engines in the hopes of grabbing their piece of the pie.

In the face of a struggling economy and general hard times, it is hard to avoid the temptation to indulge in various mailing tactics that are not best practices, like dusting off older segments of mailing lists, significantly increasing mail volume, sending mail across channels where permission was not explicitly given, buying mailing lists, etc.

Some may argue that there is no harm engaging in squirrely practices in the interest of making the sale now and then cleaning up the results later – immediate gratification always feels good and makes the financial quarter’s bottom line look great – but… there are costs which may not be immediately obvious... [Read the rest on the Unica blog]

Don't Be That Guy!

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 15:20:00 +0000

I wrote a piece for the IBM Unica blog about a very well crafted scam mail I got recently. If you're interested please cruise on over there and check it out.

Hope everyone is doing well!

What is "Being Informed"?

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 20:32:00 +0000

This isn't about spam. It isn't even really about permission, but more about a tangential issue surrounding the thorny dilemma of how to usefully inform the largest number of people of a product change while simultaneously not pissing off any appreciable fraction of your user-base. The bigger the user-base, the bigger the problem. I recently had an interaction with Facebook, which has a staggeringly huge user-base, that got me thinking about this issue.

There is a new feature that Facebook has enabled that filters your news feed based on whether or not you have recently interacted with one of your "friends". This was a complete surprise to me, and explains some stuff that had been puzzling me about my Facebook news-feed lately. I objected, on my FB Wall, saying that I would have expected to have been informed of such a change. FB replied that the change was widely requested, had been publicized on team and product pages, and that is it documented in the Help pages. He posed the question: "Where would you have looked for it, or how would you have wanted to be told this sort of thing?"

Well, ok. I thought this over for a while, and came up with the following: To me, being informed of a major product or privacy policy change means that the information is pushed to me, and I should not have to go looking for explanations of updates for big-impact changes. To answer his specific question: in this particular situation, I feel that a message to my Facebook inbox from Facebook Development staff would have been appropriate, or else one of those floating boxes at the top of my feed that they've previously used to announce other changes. I would not have "gone looking" for anything at all, because I didn't have a concrete problem that would have provoked me into searching for a solution. I just thought that my friends weren't posting much, or that my posts were more than usually boring, so no-one was replying to me.

A counter-example would be when Facebook rolled out the new Profile look. There was a notice at the top of my feed, announcing the change and inviting me to take a tour of the new features. If I remember correctly, there was even the option to roll it back to the older Profile look if you didn't like the new one.

My bank recently rolled out some major new feature. Rather than relying on email to get the message out, what they chose to do was to have a temporary screen inserted between my log-in and accounts, with a brief description of the new offering, and the option to click a link to learn more, or to decline and move on to my account overview. If I declined, it told me that I could opt-in to using it in future if I wished, and told me where to look to enable the feature should I change my mind.

Each approach is different and yields a different user "experience".

End users are tricky and capricious creatures that are increasingly burned out. What about y'all? How would you define "being informed" in this sort of context? What approach(es) to informing you, as a user, would make you feel up-to-date and happy?

Stupid Spammer!

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 11:33:00 +0000

I stumbled across this website in an IRC channel, and went to look at it. It´s wonderful! It opens with a sentence that is so stunningly giggle-inducingly gorgeous that I must repeat it here: SORBS is a new organization that’s run exclusively by the Spamhaus organization. Where SpamHaus is primarily a European based organization, SORBS is an American based organization and it is quickly rising to become one of the most effective American blacklisting agencies in the world. O RLY?! I wonder how I missed that announcement...

Clicking around some more, I find a page that purports to sell a comprehensive list of "Abusive Complaining Email Addresses", which is a list I'd bet I'm on given how very little spam my former work address gets even after nearly 10 years. "Even though your (as long as your in compliance with the Federal Can Spam Act) completely legal in doing this, they completely and utterly flip out. They will actually take the time to report you to your domain registrar, your hosting company and your hosting companies upstream provider. There are relentless and a lack of a better world: JERKS for doing so."

OMG I'M SUCH A JERK.

There are some other things that amused me about this site. Apparently they don't want their incredibly valuable content to be copied (maybe they know that the only reason that would happen is for the sake of mockery?) but haha! my No-Script defeated their puny attempt at using Javascript to prevent copying and here I am, being a JERK and quoting their page directly.

The insane content, lack of copy-editing, lazy use of obvious stock photos, and some hilarious typos (We Will Reply To You Shorty) Hey!!I'm not short! made me think it was a parody, but no! The site is apparently run by Joshua Greenwood, ROKSO'd spammer, so desperate for hosting for his pathetic scams that he's gone off to Russia to get it.

The really sad part is that he will probably make some money from this. People are endlessly gullible, and always looking for the shortcut to problems that have no shortcut. There's no silver bullet for finding spam-traps in mailing lists, other than collecting the data correctly the first time, and even then sometimes things can go wrong: A company I know of narrowly avoided a major mess because they'd sent email to a guy that had provided his email address to them during a marketing phone call. They sent him marketing email regularly and about 9 months later he reported them, apparently having forgotten the original interaction. Innocent mistake on his part, no wrong-doing on the part of the company, but even so it was a near thing.

My readers are no doubt the choir that I am preaching to, but perhaps y'all can go forth and disabuse any folks you know that are new to the email marketing game of the idea that there is anything easy about it, and teach them about the evils of list purchasing and the seething masses of con-artists out there who are sooooooo anxious to Help Them Send Email Successfully - for a reasonable fee, of course.

AOL MX record vanishes for 3 hours

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 10:57:00 +0000

I woke up this morning, EU time, to hear "AOL's MX record is missing!". I shot awake and poked around and yes, sure enough it was in fact missing. After some backing and forthing with the AOL NOC, and some undeserving folks getting bounced out of bed at 5AM, it's back and functional. So if y'all have clients wondering why they had a rash of weird bounces from AOL, that's why.

I know I'm going to be explaining this several dozen times today to my own clients...

What is wrong with this?

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:19:00 +0000

"Jigsaw is the world's most reliable crowd-sourced database of B2B business contacts."

This was extracted from a SalesForce email advert. The mind boggles.

Classmates.com - quel surprise!

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:35:00 +0000

I've been a sort of unwilling member of Classmates.com for a long, long time. I don't really remember why I signed up, but I did, getting the "free" version of the site. They spent many years trying to convince me to upgrade, using various methods and tricks which have been widely reported and complained about, though that hasn't appeared to make them change their minds. I especially loved the "your classmates are looking for you!" ones, since I hated just about everyone in high school and they hated me right back, so that they would be looking for me is unlikely in the extreme. (and the ones that didn't hate found me on....yup, Facebook). I've ignored the deluge of Classmates mail for years, marking it as spam when I remembered to.

Today something tripped my trigger and I decided I wanted off their mailing list. It's of zero value to me, so I looked at their email to see how to unsubscribe. I was pleased to find a removal link at the bottom of the page. Okay, great!

*clicky*.

UH OH! Looky here!

Already registered with Classmates? Log in below.
Not registered? Click here.

Email or Registration Number
Password

Save password on this computer (What's this?)
Having trouble with a saved password?
Forgot your password?
Forgot your email or registration number?

What's wrong with this picture? A CAN-SPAM violation, you say? You'd be right. A glaring one, that puts them in direct violation of Federal law. You'd think a company that has had a class action suit for fraud filed against them (which they settled to the tune of 9.2 million dollars but... did not admit any wrongdoing) would be interested in not pissing off the Feds.

I note with interest that they have changed mailing methods since the last time I had a reason to look at them. They used to use Verizon Business but for whatever reason (I don't know the reason for sure, but I can speculate, and I am, I am!) are now doing their own mailings, using IPs leased from Level 3.

Since I don't know the password, I cannot unsubscribe, so I guess I will just continue to mark their mail as spam, and perhaps see if I can find my buddy at L3 and see if he can talk some sense to them.

Grmph. Some days I wish I could still whack spammers when I am grumpy.

Oh CRAP!

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Wed, 26 May 2010 04:37:00 +0000

[Edit: it appears that the site I reference has gone down under the load of people looking at it - I am in no way the only person linking to it and I think the poor guy got slashdotted. It is also referenced here at SANS, and a video here.]

When I can look at a new attack vector and think "oh, CRAP" and "wow, that's really clever!" it's cause for concern. Check out this thing I just found, called "tabnabbing". It changes your tab after a while, to look like the site they want to phish you for.

Say you have a few tabs open, and you click out of the site you're in...while you're not looking, it will turn into something else, something you often use, like Gmail. You'll look at the familiar page and think "Oh, well, Gmail logged me out. Annoying, but it happens," and you'll log in, giving the phisher what he wants. Try it - load the page that explains this exploit, click out of it to another tab, and watch the original tab. Within 5 seconds it will be "Gmail". Look at the URL in the address bar - it's not Gmail at all, but in every other respect it looks exactly like it. That page is benign, as it is an example, but it will clearly display how sneaky this is. This exploit relies on human visual memory and the fact we are creatures of habit. It will work like a charm.

Time to start paying attention to the URLs of pages you already opened. Please spread this around as widely as you can! This. Is. Not. Cool.

..except, in that "respect your enemy" sort of way, it really IS cool.

Help! Let me out!

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Mon, 10 May 2010 16:17:00 +0000

Ive been watching the iPad launch and first adoption with interest and some dismay. Some of my friends, who definitely qualify as Major Geeks, bought one and absolutely love it, while being aware of its limitations. Fair enough. I can see a parallel there with me loving my Saturn sedan, even though it is not a sports car; it does certain things very well, and I am happy with that. It's not the geeks that have me bothered anyway: they know what's going on and have made educated choices.

What bothers me about it all is the sort of sheep-like acceptance by the general population of the walled garden it represents. I never like to see people blindly accepting restrictions of personal freedom, though one could argue successfully that most people don't need more from their "Internet experience" than what an iPad can provide: an easy way to access Facebook, watch some YouTube, check mail, play some games. And the subtle beauty of it is that it doesn't need all the maintenance and patching that a Windows box does, nor does it need geek know-how to run like Linux does. It's simple, easy, safe, and relatively inexpensive. Perfect for approximately 80% of the users out there.

So I find myself in a bit of a personal quandary. I dislike the creeping resurgence of the walled garden - AOL was the training wheels for the internet and I had idealistically hoped that one day people would grow past the need. I was wrong. I watched this video and died a little inside.

As a geek and amateur security nerd, I have to appreciate the popularity of the iPad. It will, one can only hope, reduce the number of infected PCs and pissed-off users, and slow the dissolution of the Internet a little bit. As a person who is acutely aware of the concept of "use it or lose it" as it applies to personal freedom, I am deeply dismayed. Which is more important, in the end? Safety or freedom? I know which I'd choose for myself, but which is right for the mass of users out there? And at what ultimate cost?

As usual, I do not have the answers. I only have questions that keep me awake at night.

The exodus continues...

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 01:14:00 +0000

Madkins - May you love California as much as I do.

Interview with a Vampi^H^H Spamfighter, part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 14:46:00 +0000

The second half of my Unica interview with Len Shneyder is now up. It was fun to do, and I hope that y'all enjoy it and maybe find something useful in it.

Thanks for the intervention with the weather gods, people! It's stopped raining, for which I'm certain my Bostonian friends are grateful. That chugging noise you hear is the sound of many sump pumps running at full capacity.

..that exploding noise you heard was my head, trying to get Excel and SQL stuffed into it. Anyone know if there's a better book than Excel for Dummies out there?

A perfect graph

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:00:00 +0000

In lieu of actual spam-related and thoughtful content, this will have to do. It seems to me to be a spot-on diagram of what I hear my friends complaining about all the time. (I'm not a programmer but it happens to me also!)

In case Blogger doesn't do what I expect it to, the image was found here.

New Day, New Job...New Blog?

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 15:09:00 +0000

After a hiatus, the blog lurches back to life.

I was busy doing something unprecedented: relaxing! Then a couple weeks ago I started at my new job as Email Service Manager at Unica, the specifics of which is still somewhat undefined. I'll be working on the new Unica email service offering, helping grow it from the ground, on up. It's an exciting opportunity and I'm working with people I like a lot. The team is not completely staffed yet, so I'm waiting with bated breath to see who is hired next. Len Shneyder did an introductory interview with me, the first part of which was published today.

I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with the blog at this point. Lots of things are changing in my life and everything is a bit upside down still. I imagine it will struggle a bit to regain some sort of identity as I settle into harness in this new world I'm in, but I do intend to keep it alive in some fashion! At the moment I am in soggy Boston, learning the ropes. I doubt y'all would be interested in basic SQL, so I will post something when I get home where my notes are, next week.

See you then!

Closing a Chapter: saying goodbye

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:43:00 +0000

It is with very mixed feelings that I am announcing my imminent departure from AOL: my last day with the company will be this Friday, March 5. It's been 8 years, a long wild ride that has been a great deal of fun, but all good things must come to an end sooner or later, and the time has come for me to move on to something different.

What this means to you: escalation paths and such are still being worked out, but the India Postmaster team and I have spent a lot of time working together in the last couple months; they'll take care of you. The AOL postmaster website and reputation tool should also be useful. I'll provide any further information as I get it.

I've worked very closely with Laura Atkins from Word To The Wise over the years, and she knows her AOL stuff backward and forward - if you need consulting for AOL help, she can provide it. She's also written a solid reference to AOL processes (as well as many other ISPs), which I'd encourage people to make use of.

It's been wonderful working with you all, and I'm going to miss it, and you. I will continue writing here once the madness dies down; for the rest...I am going to spend next week re-reading Anne McCaffrey's Dragons of Pern series - doesn't everyone wish they had their own dragon? and then begin my new job at the end of this month. The particular detail of "where" is not yet public, though it will be soon.

I'll be around. Mazel Tov, people! So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Fixed!

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:05:00 +0000

Aberrant error code for invalid users has been corrected. Official post here.

Blogging, Interrupted

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:15:00 +0000

There's been a little too much going on here what with the four feet of snow for me to be able to sit down and write, and MAAWG is next week. So for now, please enjoy some photos of the recent blizzards.

Snowstream

2:20AM

Error code updates

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:29:00 +0000

AOL is issuing an additional error code for "users unknown" for a while. Official update here. If you're using scripts to remove users, please add this code.

Friday Foolery and Super Bonus Contest! BUY NOW!

noreply@blogger.com (Annalivia) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:30:00 +0000

Friday is not a day for serious topics, despite the recent memo that decrees that all weekdays are now All Monday All The Time. I therefore declare my blog to be topic-free on Fridays. I will just post a photo I like, be it mine or one I found somewhere. It's been an Arctic week here on the East Coast. And we are going to get more snow. This is a photo of my girl Daisy bounding through the snow we got Dec 19 last year. I can't wait to see what I can get of her after this coming storm!

POINK!

There is a truly impressive storm system that is churning its way up here, and in honor of the foolery that will no doubt result from 2 feet of snow on the ground - snowball fights with the neighbor kids, snow forts, and really happy dogs, I thought it could be fun to have a contest. With a prize, even!

I was pondering what my cyberpunk marketing nightmare would be. So for the contest, given the parameters of unhinged future technology a-la-Gibson, what would your worst marketing nightmare scenario look like? Leave your entries in the comments, and I will award a $15 item from Amazon of your choice shipped to you if your entry is chosen.

To give an idea of what I mean, maybe your worst scenario would be little air blimps that follow you along city streets and blare ads at you, or maybe full-sensory virtual reality gaming sessions being interrupted by equally full sensory garish commercials. Think cyberpunk, future tech, and how it could be warped to push ads in front of people in the most intrusive and annoying ways possible. Let your imagination loose! I'll post mine some time tomorrow, just for fun since I can't win the thing.

The winner will be chosen next Friday, so I will close submissions that Thursday evening. I can't wait to see what the demented imaginations of my readers can come up with! Indulge me, please?

Happy snowstorm, East Coast Americans! Happy Friday and weekend to everyone else!