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.