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July 28, 2005
Don't Awake the Sleeping Giant
So this AM I got a nice email from Microsoft, loaded with all the spam stats they could fit in an email. With the AM announcment of the purchase of an anti spam company and the Sedner ID buzz, seems that they are charging ahead to squash all threats.
Was this due to the viral email from Bill Gates promising us millions? Is he that pissed?
We applaud the work that Microsoft is doing to lead this cart with a stick and not a carrot, but they really need to open up some channels to talk to more partners in the space and not heavy hand.
Read the Email below.
PERCEPTION: Unwanted e-mail isn't a serious business threat.
REALITY: The statistics tell a different story.
60%: average percentage of e-mail consisting of unwanted e-mail 1
$22 BILLION: average yearly economic impact of time spent deleting unwanted e-mail 2
18.5: mean number of unwanted e-mails received per day 2
54 MINUTES PER DAY: average amount of IT time spent on unwanted e-mail-related issues 3
Left uncontrolled, unwanted e-mail severely impacts bandwidth on your network, storage space on your mail server, and support time of your IT staff. Fortunately, the advanced security features in the latest editions of Microsoft® Office--such as Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003--and Exchange Server 2003 work together to help provide an end-to-end solution.
Exchange Server 2003 helps block most unwanted e-mail before it can even reach employees' mailboxes. Then, Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 filters unwanted e-mail further. With both, you can help maximize the protection of your company's e-mail while minimizing IT time spent maintaining your network. Additionally, Software Assurance gives you access to the support, tools, and training you need to get the very most from your software investment.
How much is unwanted e-mail costing your company?
Find out now with our Spam Cost Calculator.
Learn more, and put these powerful tools to work in your company. Get our 2005 Spam Fighter Report today.* Discover how new technologies in the latest editions of Microsoft Office and Exchange Server 2003 can help keep your company safe from the influx of unwanted e-mail.
Get the 2005 Spam Fighter Report now.
http://www.ms-resources.com/fightspam1/default.aspx?source=EEA10
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 5:32 PM | Permalink
July 25, 2005
The Russian Front
I mean maybe we are approaching this whole CanSpam /Sender ID thing with the wrong methods. Maybe we should follow in the footsteps of the Russian who just kill spammers. Do you think that would get the message across and end this spam problem?
I kind of think it would.
Russia’s Biggest Spammer Brutally Murdered in Apartment
Vardan Kushnir, notorious for sending spam to each and every citizen of Russia who appeared to have an e-mail, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head.
Kushnir, 35, headed the English learning centers the Center for American English, the New York English Centre and the Centre for Spoken English, all known to have aggressive Internet advertising policies in which millions of e-mails were sent every day.
In the past angry Internet users have targeted the American English centre by publishing the Center’s telephone numbers anywhere on the Web to provoke telephone calls. The Center’s telephone was advertised as a contact number for cheap sex services, or bargain real estate sales.
Another attack involved hundreds of people making phone calls to the American English Center and sending it numerous e-mails back, but Vardan Kushnir remained sure of his right to spam, saying it was what e-mails were for.
Under Russian law, spamming is not considered illegal, although lawmakers are working on legal projects that could protect Russian Internet users like they do in Europe and the U.S.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 10:17 PM | Permalink
July 22, 2005
A General Reports In on the War
Major General Bill Nussey spent some time with iMedia talking about the state of the industry. He covers the maturation of email marketing, deliverability, and the moral of the troops in the trenches.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 5:43 PM | Permalink
July 21, 2005
The Tide is Turning
A GREAT short article from Matt. Wonderfully written and enough to help most understand why we all need to embrace authentication. You go Matt.
E-mail Authentication
BY NOW EVERY MARKETER HAS learned that Internet service providers (ISPs) take e-mail authentication quite seriously -- with Microsoft leading the charge with Sender ID. Microsoft is using a stick, not a carrot, to make e-mail senders get on the authentication band wagon. E-mailers who do not publish a proper sender ID record are now going to find themselves in the bulk mail folder at Hotmail and MSN, as well as have a big fat disclaimer thrown on top of their e-mails from Microsoft warning users that the source of the e-mail can't be authenticated.
I'm a big fan of authentication. Here are some positive aspects of authentication:
- It WILL make a big dent in spoofing, phishing, and fraud, right away. Why? Because those particular elements of the 'Internet Axis of Evil' are identity-based. Therefore, identity authentication will either stop those things, make it easier for consumers to steer clear of them, or make it easier for law enforcement to go after them.
- It WILL NOT make a big dent in spam right away. Why? Because spam is much more nuanced than fraud. If I'm Microsoft, and I know that you are the particular sender of an e-mail into my network, that's all good and well. But I might not have any idea if I want to accept that mail. Another way of saying this: Spammers can publish sender ID records too.
- It WILL lay the foundation for longer-term spam solutions. Why? Because it is important to understand exactly who is sending mail into a network in order to answer that next question of "do I want to accept your mail?"
Authentication is the precursor for both reputation and accreditation. Once ISPs can identify who you are, they can decide whether they like you or not. Lots of factors play into this decision, including complaint rates, identity stability, unknown user volume, security practices, unsubscribe policies and more.
When it comes to reaching the e-mail inbox, one thing is clear: It is not automatic, nor is it an easy path. Vigilance is required by all e-mail senders to make sure they are keeping up with the technologies and best practices necessary to keep their customers happy -- and avoid negative perceptions by e-mail receivers making filtering decisions.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 4:15 AM | Permalink
July 20, 2005
Why We Are Still At War
I mean so it seems from this report that we are all directly responsible for why spam works. I mean come on for all of those that are complaining, filing reports, creating hell for the legit companies, there are those that are actually converting in a sale? What the hell.
People, if you don't like spam and want to end it, stop opening it and at the least, stop buying from it. This is truly a disturbing study.
Why Spam Works
It's always been a perplexing question. Why — when everyone purports to hate spam so much — does so much of it keep piling up in our e-mail inboxes?
A study done by the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland found that on average Americans receive nearly 20 spam messages a day.
No one wants spam. In fact, they are willing to pay handsomely to avoid it. IDC projects that anti-spam product and service revenues will climb close to $2 billion by 2008.
Yet the spam keeps coming. Why?
According to a new survey of nearly 800 end users, comprising 34% corporate business users and 66% consumers, by Mirapoint and the Radicati Group, the answer is simple. Many of the people who claim to hate spam are supporting the practice by buying products from spammers.
The survey found that 11% of users purchase products and services from spam e-mails — even though 9% of users have lost money to e-mail scammers!
Even if they don't buy products, 39% of users admit to clicking on embedded links within spam, other than the unsubscribe link. Clicking links within spam e-mail not only alerts the spammer that the e-mail address is active, it can direct users to Web sites that install viruses, spyware and other malicious code. Not surprisingly, 57% of respondents who click on spam links say they receive more spam.
The findings are even more perplexing than a study conducted this year by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which found that 6% of Americans online buy from spammers.
There is only one effective way to stop spam. As Marcel Nienhuis of the Radicati Group says, "If people stop buying products from spam, spam would probably go away."
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 4:48 PM | Permalink
July 19, 2005
Parachutes Assist in Getting the Troops In
Latest study shows some solid numbers, we are pulling ours to publish this week and I will be interested to see how they match up. One odd thing is the top10 domains they list. I would assume Yahoo and Earthlink and even Road runner, but mac.com. Very small group in total, as we are mac users ourselves, this shocked us.
Read on.
Q2 e-mail delivery rates held steady during second quarter, Lyris says
E-mail delivery rates held steady at 89% during the second quarter, with 97.1% average rate for the top ten Internet service providers, according to Lyris EmailAdvisor.
The top 10 U.S. domains by inbox delivery rates were mail.com, 97.79%; earthlink.net, 97.74%; peoplepc.com, 97.68%; usa.net, 97.46%; socal.rr.com (RoadRunner), 97.46%; cs.com (CompuServe), 97.08%; yahoo.com, 96.96%; lycos.com, 96.8%; knology.net, 96.3%; and mac.com, 95.97%.
Inappropriate spam filtering among U.S. domains fell from an average 3.3% in the first quarter to 1.4% in the second quarter. Lyris says the drop may reflect an overall trend toward more accurate and sophisticated spam filtering by ISPs and e-mail service providers.
Among the seven domains showing top delivery rates in both the first and second quarters, all showed diminishing rates of blocked or undelivered e-mail messages.
Lyris, provider of e-mail marketing services, monitored 72,406 opt-in e-mail marketing messages sent between April 1 and June 30 from 49 different businesses and non-profit organizations to multiple accounts at 41 ISP and e-mail service provider domains in the United States and Europe.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 4:33 PM | Permalink
July 18, 2005
The Geneva Convention
I love that after all of the rules and regs the FTC threw around and hoops everyone needed to jump through (although it did help some), they now back Authentication. We do too. Make those that are legit marketers get into a system that can regulate them. Good for business and good for my inbox.
FTC Wants Authentication, Email Industry Responds
Not too long ago, the Federal Trade Commission was worried at the snail's pace of authentication-standards adoption by the email industry, reports DM News. The FTC and Direct Marketing Association have viewed authentication - technologies for confirming the originators of email - as the best way to combat spam and email fraud, and both groups have opposed a national do-not-email list.
In recent months, the industry's response has finally gained momentum.The Email Authentication Implementation Summit 2005, held this week in New York, urged widespread adoption of authentication methods, DM News writes.
At the conference, emailers who already use authentication urged others to do the same. Only one-quarter of emails going to MSN Hotmail, for example, use Sender ID, according to MSN. Industry acceptance of email authentication could be critical to maintaining email deliverability rates. Authentication is important for protecting brands and consumer relationships as well, summit speakers said.
Some spammers and phishers already have adopted email authentication, so the next step is to build a reputation network that can differentiate good emailers from bad ones, speakers stressed.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 7:10 PM | Permalink
July 17, 2005
Authentication "Kind of" Fights Spam
While some e-mail services have adopted SenderID, there are still many that have not. According to Cox, the other reason for the false positives is that not all users remain on a single server. “SPF says, ‘All of my mail should come from these servers,’” says Cox. For many of EarthLink’s customers, they can be legitimately on a variety of servers, such as a corporate server, and still send and receive mail using their EarthLink address. For those users, SPF fails.
EarthLink started testing DomainKeys in the first quarter of 2005 and now signs over 70% of all outgoing mail. Other companies are also testing DomainKeys. Yahoo! Mail claims to be receiving approximately 350 million inbound DomainKeys signed messages per day.
Critics have accused Microsoft forcing SenderID on the industry without addressing questions about perceived shortcomings. The company drew fresh criticism recently when reports claimed that its Hotmail service would delete all messages without a valid SenderID record beginning in November. While AOL uses SPF, many e-mail systemsdo not. If Microsoft went through with this, for example, a significant portion of valid e-mails would never reach intended Hotmail recipients.
Microsoft says that Hotmail will not junk legitimate e-mail solely because the sending domain lacks an SPF record. The company says SenderID will be weighed more heavily in filtering e-mails, but will remain one of the many factors used when evaluating incoming e-mail. The company did say that with increased adoption of Sender ID and SPF, it will eventually become a more reliable indicator.
Both SenderID and DomainKeys filter messages with spoofed e-mail addresses in which the sender has changed the "From:"field to make it look like someone else has sent the e-mail.
Comments (1) | Posted by dylan at 3:10 PM | Permalink
July 16, 2005
Let's Fight Fair
E-Mailers Lobby FTC for Opt-Out Sunset Provision
E-mail marketers are lobbying the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to add a sunset provision to the CAN-SPAM Act that would allow e-mail addresses to be automatically removed from suppression files after five years.
Because people change e-mail addresses far more often than they do their phone number or street address, e-mail address churn is significantly higher than churn in other direct marketing channels.
Twenty-two percent of people responding to a recent survey by New York-based e-mail service provider (ESP) Bigfoot Interactive say they've switched e-mail accounts in the last year, or are considering switching accounts in the next 12 months.
Marketers contend as a result, within five years, hundreds of millions of e-mail addresses no longer in use by the people who opted-out of the list in question will pollute suppression files.
Under the current CAN-SPAM Act, an address owner must provide "affirmative consent" for an address to be removed from a suppression file,
In contrast, telephone numbers on the FTC's do-not-call registry automatically expire in five years.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 3:06 PM | Permalink
July 15, 2005
Blame it on the Drones
Zombie Networks Account for Majority of Spam in June
During June, spam sent through zombie PCs accounted for an average of 62 percent of all spam filtered by the MX Logic Threat Center. This compares with 55 percent in May and 44 percent in April.
“The continued proliferation of zombie PCs has levied a heavy cost on ISPs and email end users,” Chasin said. “Compromised PCs have resulted in millions of email users being unknowingly blacklisted, often through no fault of their own.”
Zombie PCs are neglected, “always-connected” broadband PCs that spammers hijack by installing a spam Trojan. Once infected, these zombie PCs provide worm authors with remote command-and-control spam-distribution capabilities, allowing them to create a legion of zombie computers that can pump out unwanted email and initiate Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
“To make a real dent in the amount of spam sent globally, efforts must focus on helping service providers reduce outbound messaging abuse by identifying compromised PCs,” Chasin said.
One such effort began in May, when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), along with 35 government partners from over 20 countries, unveiled “Operation Spam Zombies.” This international campaign is designed to educate Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and other Internet connectivity providers about hijacked, or zombie, computers that spammers use to flood inboxes.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 6:16 AM | Permalink
July 14, 2005
The Secret Weapons Discovered?
Text is the key to success? And this whole time we have been telling people it is cool images. Right.
We all know that we have about three seconds to capture the attention of the subscriber. We need to nail the subject and from line even before the open of the email. I have seen studies about using the word "free" and other spam filter words, but I can tell you that this only helps in the Shotgun approach. This is if you have massive lists that you can afford to get thrown some percentage of the time into a junk box and other times get the open. Most marketers have list from 15K to 150K on average, except the big portals, merchants and destination sites and travel sites.
Read below, as it is a great article, but know that this is not the magic pill.
Study: Evocative Text Is the Secret to Email Success
Online marketer Bluestreak's latest email report, published Monday, highlights the email marketing practices of leading practitioners who consistently achieve superior open and click-through rates, the Providence Journal reports. The email marketing leaders had open rates of more than 45 percent (10 percentage points more that the average) and click rates at almost three times the average - 20 percent.
"It's interesting to see that across all types of industries spanning direct to consumer and BtoB, certain tactics prevail for all email marketing leaders," said Bluestreak CMO Anurag Ahuja. Chief among those tactics is the testing of email subject lines.
Leaders are up to three times more likely to test subject lines for a campaign, and their subject lines are only 1.2 characters longer than average (38.3 characters) - but more descriptive. Message content is also longer (almost 60 words more than average) - and, again, more descriptive.
The email leaders use more than 27 links per message to encourage calls to action, compared with the average of 19 links.
The email report can be downloaded from www.bluestreak.com
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 6:25 AM | Permalink
July 13, 2005
Nurse Ann to Triage Please
One of my favorite editors, Anne Holland, from MarketingSherpa had a great post in her newsletter today. She gave some good stats on the state of the industry from the many client, ISP and ESP sources they speak with regularly. Nice work Anne.
"Can phishing emails make people miss or deliberately delete messages they would otherwise want to receive from businesses?" Andrew Brandt, Senior Associate Editor PC World, interviewed me last week for an article he's working on.
Three factors made me say yes:
#1. Open rates are slipping unexpectedly. Open rates for HTML campaigns to house lists from legit mailers had been holding fairly steady for the past couple of years. Now, according to data from both MarketingSherpa and DoubleClick's separate research efforts, opens are sliding down faster than expected. (How much depends on your niche, frequency, and deliverability savvy.)
#2. A June study by Lyris Technologies revealed 100 consumers were likely to mistake legit messages (even from big brand name companies) as phishing scams if they were badly laid out text-only or had HTML code errors (happens more frequently than you think).
#3. I automatically delete the dozens of emails I get per day "from" financial institutions and the world's fave auction site without looking at them because I assume these are all scams. And I bet you might do the same.
Brandt's next question was what can legit emailers do to make sure their messages aren't mistaken as phishing? Here are some tips:
Tip A. Higher quality production values
Consumers expect scam artists' messages to feel amateurish with typos, reply addresses that no longer work, and improperly rendered images (because perhaps they had to switch servers in a hurry).
Make sure your HTML email is coded properly by passing it through the validator at http://validator.w3.org and check the whoever is serving your images will have them up and live on time and for a good long time -- such as weeks, not just days.
Plus, take a good look at your text-only version. Never ever let your email department auto-create this based on your HTML content. Text layout must be handcrafted separately for readability and appeal.
Tip B. Consider password protection software
When we were interviewing Secure Computing's marketer Shelley Maley for our top Case Study this week (see below), she explained one of their products can protect your customers against phishing by changing their passwords in some automated fashion. I don't pretend to understand this technology ... but hey, why not sic your IT department on the idea?
Tip C. Test alternate and mixed delivery methods
If the email message is critical either to your bottom line or because you are legally obliged to deliver it, then you can't rely on email alone anymore.
Try multi-channel campaigns -- if a consumer sees matching messages from a variety of sources (such as your new print catalog cover and a matching email campaign) they're more likely to assume it's legit email and more likely to respond.
Also, set up a program to automatically switching consistent non-openers (or for text-only, consistent non-clickers) to a completely different media, such as print.
You should also proactively contact top accounts and key prospects via phone, postal mail, or on-screen pop-up to see what the problem is. Perhaps the address is bad. Perhaps their filter is confused. Perhaps they want off your list.
Plus, consider offering alternate electronic delivery methods such as desktop apps, downloadable toolbars, RSS feeds, IM alerts, SMS alerts, etc. to your best customers. But, if you do, build in above-average reporting from the start so you can track usership on an account basis.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 6:16 AM | Permalink
July 12, 2005
Will a Shot Clear it Up Doc?
Email forwarding amounts to ritual gift exchange
Forwarding a quirky email or an amusing link or video attachment to colleagues may seem innocent enough, but it is the modern equivalent of ritual gift exchange and carries with it similar social implications, say US researchers.
Email forwarding is a familiar part of modern email communications, and has spawned many an internet phenomenon, the Star Wars kid, the Numa Numa dance, and Oolong the rabbit to name just a few.
Benjamin Gross at the University of Illinois, US, and colleagues studied email forwarding behaviour by conducting informal interviews among email users. He says forwarding emails plays a vital role in constructing and maintaining modern social ties, despite the phenomenon receiving scant attention from social scientists.
Forwarding a genuinely amusing or interesting link to a friend, for example, shows that you are thinking of them and are aware of the sort of content they like, Gross says. But passing an irrelevant or out-of-date link on to contacts can be annoying, thus lowering the sender's social status in the recipient’s eyes.
“Viral” marketing
"If they are consistently wrong about what content is of actual interest to recipients their reputation may drop in the implicit system people must apply in order to [prioritise] their email," Gross writes in a paper co-authored with Jeff Ubois at the University of California, Berkley, and Marc Smith at Microsoft Research in Redmond, both in the US.
The power of email-mediated social networks has, of course, already been identified by marketing firms, who often try to exploit them through "viral" marketing campaigns. This involves creating a video clip or website that includes an advertising message and hoping that it gets passed on via email to thousands of internet users.
Gross says email-forwarding networks could prove useful in other ways. He points to a software project called Forward Track, which can monitor email forwarding chains, making it possible for political groups to keep track of those who have forwarded a political message to friends.
Microsoft has also developed software to map the networks created through email forwarding. A prototype program called Social Network and Relationship Finder, or SNARF, can be used to create a picture of the social and business networks constructed through email communications.
The researchers will present their paper at the Second Conference on Email and Anti-Spam in California from 21 July.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 9:44 PM | Permalink
The Cold War Begins
Like Russia and the US in the 60's the Cold War between what every individual domain owner will have to do to get an email into an inbox gets more complicated. We can't have 15 different rules (SenderId, Domain Keys, Trusted Sender, Bonded Sender, Postini, etc) if we ever expect to even be able to get an email to our dear old mom.
"Yeah mom I sent you that thank you but it must have not gotten to you as I am not sure if my Domain Keys is still active, or was it my sender ID?" Really what is this all about. I believe in making things better for everyone, but heck let's standardize. I don't care if it is MS or anyone else. Let's pick a poison and drink it together.
Yahoo!, Cisco Systems Propose Anti-Spam Technology
YAHOO! AND CISCO SYSTEMS HAVE proposed as an industry standard the anti-spam technology the two launched in early June. Dubbed DomainKeys Identified Mail, the tool which verifies the origins of e-mail messages, was the combination two related and rival tools: Yahoo!'s Domain Keys and Cisco's Identified Internet Mail.
Working with software markers Sendmail and PGP, the two companies submitted their joint technology to the Internet Engineering Task Force over the weekend. Known as DKIM, the e-mail authentication technology uses key cryptography that allows users to verify and maintain message integrity, and identifies legitimate messages. It's useful for companies that send transactional e-mail to consumers, including banks, telecoms, and online merchants.
Being offered to the industry royalty-free, DKIM borrows elements from Yahoo!'s DomainKeys and the network equipment maker's Internet Identified Mail system. And while technical differences exist, each attaches a scrambled digital signature to a user's mail, which can then be vetted to make sure that it's actually being sent from the domain in the sender's address.
Both Yahoo!'s e-mail service and Google's Gmail e-mail have initiated DomainKeys, and a huge demand for just such a collaboration existed, according to Miles Libbey, anti-spam product manager for Yahoo! Mail.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 3:46 PM | Permalink
July 11, 2005
Welcome to the Machine
Bill, we love you. This is another great article from Bill on what we need to consider as email markers and also as end consumers that subscribe to email lists.
A State of Mind
by Bill McCloskey, Wednesday, July 6, 2005
This week we have a new nominee in the Dumb Things People Do To Stop Spam awards. It is actually a tie for first place between Michigan and Utah who have both launched ill-conceived anti-spam laws, which like most nominees in this category, hurt legitimate white-hat e-mailers and reward the black hats.
Anti-spam legislation is great on the surface - it makes the lawmakers seem like they are tackling a big problem (who doesn't hate spam?). What usually happens, however, is that because they don't have enough expertise in the field, they end up making the problem much worse than it was originally. The so-called "Child Protection Registry" laws are an example.
Here is the basic law: The states put up a "Do Not E-mail" registry. The e-mail addresses are supposedly addresses that children have access to. Once the address is up for 30 days, marketers are prohibited from sending e-mails to those addresses that contain anything a child would be prohibited from purchasing. Marketers must match their list against the registry and pay for the privilege. Anyone caught violating the law is subject to fines. The law was designed to protect kids from gambling and porno e-mails. Who could find a problem with that! Right!
Wrong. I will tell you what will happen. Save this column and see if I'm not right. What you are going to unleash is a tsunami (I've been dying to use that word in a sentence) of porno ads aimed at children. You've given the purveyors a big pile of legitimate e-mail addresses. Of course, the legislators have counter-acted this by making it a felony to obtain or attempt to obtain these addresses and to use them illegally. But I have news for you: The kind of criminals that send this kind of material in the first place don't care about felonies - THAT'S WHY WE CALL THEM CRIMINALS!
And forget about addresses remaining secret. MasterCard can't even hang on to our credit card numbers, for Pete's sake! Getting by a bunch of civil servants running an e-mail registry isn't exactly like knocking over Fort Knox. Okay, so the black hats win one.
What about the white hats? Well, the way the law reads, according to DoubleClick's director of privacy technology, Brooks Dobbs in a recent Click-Z article, things like credit cards, car rentals, travel, hotels, in fact any service that a child is not allowed to purchase would be in violation of the law as well.
This means that if you sign up for a Travelocity newsletter and you sign up for the registry, Travelocity might be in violation of the Utah and Michigan law by sending you the very information you have requested. Interested in a deal on a hotel getaway package? Not if you live in Utah or Michigan, buddy. And forget about trailers for the Sandra Bullock Film "Crash" or George Romero's "Land of the Dead." Both are 'R' rated; both not available to kids.
I'm afraid it's "Herbie Fully Loaded" for you sucker.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 7:43 AM | Permalink
July 10, 2005
A One-Man Anti-Spam Crusade
If the Federal Trade Commission won't, Joe Wagner will. Fight spam, that is, even if it originates from legitimate companies likes Kraft and Bob Vila. A Wired piece profiles the 37-year-old mechanical engineer's efforts, through lawsuits, to bring to justice spammers who violate the CAN-SPAM Act. "Wagner is a kind of private-sector, internet version of New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer," writes Adam Penenberg about Wagner, who donates all money he gets from suing spammers to charity and nonprofits (so far, about $70,000 in judgments, settlements or "directed donations").
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 2:53 PM | Permalink
July 9, 2005
Medic.... Medic... I am Bleeding
Cruddy Delivery to Cause Email List Price Plunge
Look we tell clients all the time that third party list rentals are just an aircover routine and not a fix to stop the marketing and lead generation bleeding. We have known for years that these lists can be a crap shoot as we are all more protective of our inbox than ever before. And it is not just us, but the SuperPowers (ISPs, Microsoft, Yahoo, and more) that are doing everything in their powers to stop emails from people or brands you do not know from getting to your inbox.
The key is lead gen to your site, online and offline campaigns, viral and mining your inhouse lists.
Anyone for a good whitepaper, press relase or a solid webinar???? MEDIC!
Email list pricing could drop as much as 25 percent in the next 3-6 months because of decreasing deliverability rates caused by changes in the way service providers plan to handle HTML emails, Worldata predicted yesterday. In the next 12 months, Microsoft will release a new version of Outlook that filters out HTML graphics by default, decreasing delivery rates for corporate addresses, according to Worldata, and consumer ISPs are already filtering out graphics in HTML emails unless users opt to view graphics.
As of this month, permission-based B2B email lists, the highest-priced category, dipped by $8, to $281/M, compared with July 2004. Permission-based B2C email, the second-highest-priced category, also decreased by $8 to $175/M.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 7:38 AM | Permalink
July 8, 2005
Troop Deaths Decrease and Holding the Line
E-Mail Bounce Rates Improve but Open Rates Falter
E-mail marketers got fewer bounce-backs in the first quarter, but open rates declined, according to new data released by DoubleClick.
Bounce-back rates for permission-based marketing e-mails have been improving. Some 91.7% of marketing messages got through in the first quarter, DoubleClick said, compared with 88.8% a year earlier.
Bounce-back rates are down across all industry sectors, including financial services, consumer products, and business products and services.
However, e-mail marketing open rates were down in the quarter. The overall rate fell from 38.2% to 30.2%, with open rates down in every industry surveyed by DoubleClick. However, this metric is difficult to gauge accurately because measuring techniques rely on having images in an e-mail render (to tell whether a message was opened). Since many ISPs and e-mail programs block images as an anti-virus and anti-spam technique, the decline in open rates may reflect blocking programs, not usage patterns.
Click-through rates were a mixed bag. The overall rate fell to 7.9% in the latest quarter from 8.4% a year earlier, but some industries saw rates improve.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 7:20 PM | Permalink
July 7, 2005
NightVision Released On Email
The increased demand for measuring campaign results and new technologies that create more natural test settings have prompted some ad agencies to again take a gander at a research discipline that's been around a while: eye-tracking. AdAge writes that WPP Group's OgilvyOne recently struck a deal with eye-tracking firm Eyetools to test email marketing for clients such as IBM, American Express and Cisco.
Preliminary results have held some "surprises": the word "free" is often skipped, and the majority of readers see less than half of the email copy.
A camera in the frame of computer monitors tracks what portions of emails test subjects are paying attention to and what they're ignoring - without having to wear headgear or goggles, or being strapped into an electric-chair-like contraption. The results are depicted in a heat map or diagram that shows the pattern of eye movements across the email.
Put them on and see for yourself:
http://www.marketingvox.com/images/euristics.php
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 4:45 PM | Permalink
July 6, 2005
Why SenderID is not the A-Bomb
In watching the past few weeks since Microsoft rolled out SenderID, it was sooo funny to me that in about 20 minutes, every piece of spam in my inbox was SenderID okay. And every legitimate email marketer, like CNET, MLB.com, J Crew, etc is still showing up as an envelope with a "?". Scary huh. No not the fact that spammers had it down in minutes, but the fact that there is a scary "?". Makes it so forboding.
So does this whole SenderID make a change in the email I get, nope. But let's give it some time.
See the Full Size Image of My Junk box
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 9:02 PM | Permalink
July 5, 2005
How Do you Like My Kung Fu?
China Joins Global Anti-Spam Battle
China, the world's second-largest source of unsolicited emails, agreed on Monday to join an international effort led by the U.S. and the U.K. to combat spam by adopting the London Action Plan on Spam Enforcement Collaboration, ChinaTechNews reports. At a ceremony attended by U.S. Federal Trade Commissioner Jon Leibowitz and U.K. Ambassador Christopher Hum, China announced its decision to reverse earlier policies and make fighting spam a priority.
"We have long been keen to engage with China on the issue of spam," Techworld quotes Alun Michael, the UK's e-commerce minister, as saying.
According to Spamhaus, China is the second-largest source of spam, generating some 20 percent of unsolicited emails worldwide, writes Silicon.com. The United States is first.
Union Network Beijing, which is China's representative to the London Action Plan , will be the country's point of contact for the international effort.
The Plan calls for increased investigative training, the establishment of points of contact in each agency to respond quickly and effectively to enforcement inquiries, and the creation of an international working group on spam enforcement.
China, has long been unwilling to face up to the spam originating from Beijing and other large cities, mostly from so-called zombie computers taken over by spammers outside China and used to send out spam without the knowledge of their owners.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 4:42 PM | Permalink
July 4, 2005
The Flanking Manuever
Legit Emails May Look Fishier than Phishing Scams
A small study by email-marketing software firm Lyris, conducted to see whether email users could identify phishing attempts found that improperly rendered, though legitimate, emails were considered even more suspicious than the scam emails, according to a Lyris news release. An improperly rendered email from a major brand was the one most pointed to as the most suspicious message. Text emails were also were also more frequently identified as suspicious, contradicting prevailing attitudes.
The study included 100 randomly selected people who received 10 different emails. One was an improperly rendered, actual offer from a Fortune 1000 brand; two were actual phishing scam emails; the other seven were all legitimate, properly rendered email marketing messages (some were HTML, some text).
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 10:08 PM | Permalink
July 1, 2005
Email Marketers Likely Unprepared for State Laws
Email marketers might find themselves in a quandary this Friday, when "Child Protection Registry" laws, intended to protect underage email users from adult material, take effect in Michigan and Utah, ClickZ reports. Marketers who send commercial email to inboxes in those states will have to monitor registries and ensure compliance, or face significant fines and even jail time. Anyone may place any email address in the registry, while schools and child-focused organizations may register their entire domains.
After 30 days, commercial emailers are prohibited from sending emails containing advertising for (including links to) products or services that is illegal for minors, such as alcohol, tobacco, gambling, prescription drugs, or adult-rated material.
Senders found to have violated Utah's law could face up to three years in jail and $30,000 in fines, along with civil penalties of $1,000 per message. Violators of Michigan's law would face similar fines and jail time, and be liable to civil penalties of $5,000 per message or $250,000 per day of violation.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 10:47 AM | Permalink
Is This a Civil War?
How New Michigan & Utah Email Laws Affect You (Perhaps More Than You Think)
SUMMARY:
Two new state laws come into effect tomorrow, Friday, July 1st, both:
-> Directly impact permission mailers
-> Carry nasty penalties
-> Launch new state Do Not Email registries
-> Are *not* circumvented by CAN-SPAM compliance
Types of marketers affected include: financial services, matchmaking services, alcohol & tobacco, grown-up content, etc.
Plus, individuals can bring lawsuits if they think you're breaking the new laws ... so you're not protected by possibly sluggish state enforcement.
Here's our practical FAQ for permission emailers including links to the text of both laws:
Read the MarketingSherpa Guide
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 6:44 AM | Permalink
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