New Domains at Yahoo

Yahoo recently announced the addition of two new domains, ymail.com and rocketmail.com, in order to open up addresses for users that had previously been unavailable. Today on their blog they announced that they are encouraging people to move to the new accounts and delete the old ones at yahoo.com so that they are available again. They even offer a service to automate this process. The service is set up to notify people in users address books, but if you don't think that you've been successfully added to enough subscribers address books, it may not hurt to send a notification to yahoo subscribers to remind them to update their address to continue receiving your emails. If your list contains a large percentage of yahoo.com addresses this could mean an increase in complaints at that domain as people move around and new people adopt abandoned addresses.

Yahoo Paragraph Spacing

Yahoo announced today that the issues with paragraph spacing are known and that a fix will be coming. They also offered a couple of tips for yahoo design until this issue is cleared up. Read the full article here.

More Spam Law Updates

There have been several spam law changes in the world in the past month or so. Israel has passed a new spam law. The FTC of course released a ruling making clarifications to the CAN-SPAM law in the US (check out this MarketingSherpa podcast about it). MySpace was awarded $234 million in a spam suit. It makes one wonder what will be next.

List Owners, Senders, and List Rental (oh my)

DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

Last week the FTC approved a new rule provision under the CAN-SPAM act. The ruling specifically addressed multiple senders and who could be a sender and also alluded to the concept of list ownership. Based on the combination of these things list rental can fall into a gray area.

If you aren’t advertising in a list rental email, even though you are the list owner, you may not be able to be considered the sender. This has a few interesting implications. Can the list owner be the branding in the from line? Can you, or even should you offer an opt-out mechanism? All of these also carry deliverability implications as well. For instance, if the branding must be based on the renter, your authentication may be broken. Senders might not be able to capitalize on personal whitelisting, which bypasses some filtering. If it isn’t possible to be completely opted out of the list owner’s emails via an unsub link, that will lead to an increase in complaints.

To me the best solution to this dilemma from a deliverability standpoint would be make sure to brand your emails in such a way as the list owner can be perceived as an advertiser. If the list owner can be considered an advertiser in the email they would be able to be the designated sender. As the designated sender you can reap the benefits of the changes in the CAN-SPAM clarifications. But equally important is the fact that it allows you to capitalize on your own branding to potentially boost response for your advertisers.

Yahoo Drops Paragraph Spacing

According to this entry on the Email Standards Project blog, Yahoo has changed how they render messages. Yahoo no longer inserts space between paragraphs, so it may be necessary to include a margin of 1em to give some spacing. "The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email." They have a number of useful articles about rendering across platforms including this one about Outlook 2007.

FTC Approves New Rule Provision Under The CAN-SPAM Act

The FTC has announced that it is publishing clarifications to the CAN-SPAM act. The primary focus of the clarifications are (per the FTC release):

(1) an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender;
(2) the definition of "sender" was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements;
(3) a "sender" of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under United States Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a "valid physical postal address"; and
(4) a definition of the term "person" was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.

Read the press release here, and the full document is available here.

AOL Postmaster Updates

The AOL postmaster blog announced some more changes to the postmaster site. They have updated what had been their best practices to be their delivery requirements , and have introduced a new sender best practices page. According to the article "Failure to meet any of these [delivery] requirements will result in delivery issues."

MAAWG Updated Sender Best Communications Practices

MAAWG (Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group) has released an updated version of their Sender Best Communications Practices document. MAAWG is largely comprised of ISPs, blacklist providers, and others in the anti-spam community, so I like to think of this document as a roadmap for deliverability.

Email Equality

I have a friend that sells window treatments. The company he works for goes to people’s homes, show samples, take measurements, and then leave and put the orders through later. As part of this process, they tell their customers to expect an email order confirmation letting them know that the order has processed. According to my friend the company doesn’t send any types of email apart from these order confirmations, however they find themselves blocked or on blacklists.

Conventional wisdom seems to say that transactional messages are more highly relevant and therefore less likely to be complained about. Most experts, even MAAWG, often recommend that these transactional messages be placed on IP addresses dedicated only to those emails. Because they are highly relevant, it is thought that complaints are unlikely to occur, bounce rates will be low, there will be few trap hits, etc., but is that really the case? Also, given the sporadic sending patterns of transactional messages, what impact will that have on deliverability at the major ISPs that factor that into the deliverability secret sauce? I think that perhaps a better way of looking at this isn’t, "which of my emails is most important to be delivered," but rather, "every point of contact we have via email is an important opportunity to engage subscribers."

Segregating email is much like segregating people, separate but equal seldom exists. If you look at your email program and split it up so that certain types of email have better deliverability than others, you are inherently saying, "this type of email is bad and this one good," and quite possibly inherently excusing practices that can affect deliverability and even your relationship with your subscribers. If practices in one branch of your email program are being segregated because they would negatively impact deliverability to other parts of your program, maybe the answer is to fix the underlying problems with that part of the program rather than segregating your email.

AOL disables links by default

AOL postmaster blog had a post stating that they released a new version of their webmail last week that defaults to blocking links as well as images. Read all about it here. Things like this make it even more important that readers add you to their personal whitelists, and that you establish a trustworthy and relevant reputation with your reader base. Links will have to be enabled before even a "view this email in a web browser" link will work.

The (Un)Subscriber Experience

In the B2B industry, trade publications have long been a trusted resource for their readers. Subscribers know that they can expect highly relevant, well written, and validated content and they actively seek it out. As the industry moves online, it is taking all of these qualities with it. However, the online experience is inherently different from the print one. Seth Godin, the author that coined the term “permission marketing”, wrote an excellent article recently on permission. There are a lot of misconceptions of how permission marketing works. Lets take a look at some possible impact permission can have not only on an email program and online presence, but also the publication’s reputation that takes so long to build.

For a moment, place yourself in the shoes of Joe. Joe is the Director of Technology at a medium sized company. He has been lauding your publication, which he previously received in print, to all of his friends, employees and the CIO. Joe decides that he wants to receive your email newsletter too, so he goes to your website to sign up. He enters his email address in the form and sees the notice that you have a privacy policy, but doesn’t have the time or inclination to read it. After all, the text where he is opting in tells him that he is going to be receiving a daily newsletter[i].

The next day Joe receives his first daily newsletter, skims through it, and reads an article or two. He is happy that he signed up and is glad to know that online he is still getting the kind of content he has come to expect from the publisher. The next day Joe receives his daily newsletter, and he again skims through it. Later that day he receives another email suggesting that he opt in for a related publication. Joe realizes that he just signed up for this publication, so maybe they thought he’d like a companion to go with it. He decides against the other publication. The next day he receives his daily newsletter, which he still skims through, and an email from a printer company. The email appears to have come unsolicited from the printer company, but has an unsubscribe link he decides to use[ii]. He then realizes that the email from the printer company is actually from the publication he signed up for. He tries to unsubscribe from the type of publications specific to the printing company while staying signed up for other emails.

Time goes by and Joe changes jobs. The newsletter is no longer relevant and he is getting more frustrated by the emails that he has discovered he agreed to by not reading the privacy policy[iii]. Not knowing which lists he is on and therefore unable to opt out, he is left with no choice but to complain[iv]. So, Joe takes the path of least resistance and hits the “this is spam” button in his email browser. The complaining doesn’t stop there though. Joe is frustrated now. All of the people that he has told about the daily newsletter he now warns not to sign up. Joe also stops telling others about the benefits of your magazine. Potential new subscribers are being turned off before they have a chance to subscribe because of warnings that their addresses will be sold, traded, or generally “abused”.

All of this could have been avoided by taking a few simple steps:

1) Be clear at the time and place of opt in exactly what Joe will be receiving

2) Provide a clear and simple method of opting out of email globally

3) Offer a concise and easy to use preference page allowing Joe to manage the email he wants to receive

4) Respect Joe and the fact that he gave you permission by only sending to him what you have mutually agreed to send

5) Do not rely on privacy policy to convey what Joe is signing up for

In the online world, respect is crucial. If you want to keep your subscriber base and maintain a good reputation, respect your subscriber. They will return the favor.

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[i]According to Tom Bartel, Chief Privacy Officer at Return Path, historically the percentage of users that read privacy policies has been in the single to low double digits

[ii] 41% of people surveyed clicked the spam button for email that wasn’t of interest – Special Report: Spam Complainers Survey, Marketing Sherpa Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008

[iii] 25% reported spam because they received too much email from the sender - Special Report: Spam Complainers Survey, Marketing Sherpa Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008

[iv] 21% of the people surveyed reported spam to unsubscribe, even though they didn’t consider the message to be spam - Special Report: Spam Complainers Survey, Marketing Sherpa Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008

Changes at the ISPs

ISP Update

The major ISPs have been making a number of changes recently. Here is a summary of some of the major changes.

AOL –

AOL has made major changes in spam filtering. It has started using DKIM (domain keys identified mail) to authenticate email sent to their servers. They have also changed their whitelisting policies. Rather than having a proper whitelist, the application will basically be for AOL to learn who you are and what kind of mail you are sending. They will then use this information along with their reputation system to determine if your mail will be delivered. (More information available http://www.returnpath.net/blog/2008/01/changes-to-aol.php )

Yahoo –

Yahoo has been making some changes as well. In a recent blog post they announced that they will now be utilizing the spamhaus list to protect their members from spam. From the sound of the post many more changes are on the way. They have also updated their postmaster site so that it now provides more complete information. (Yahoo’s post and postmaster sites:

http://ymailupdates.com/blog/2008/01/04/yahoo-mail-taking-new-steps-to-combat-spam/ http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/index.html )

Comcast –

Comcast has released a beta version of a feedback loop, and we at Hallmark are working on getting signed up for it. The have also changed their preferred connection settings to no more messages than 6 per second. Additionally, several rr.com domains were retired. We have updated our infrastructure to manage these changes, and updated the addresses in the retired domains to a held status.