Sometimes, after you register to receive a new newsletter, you start to receive much more spam than usual. You, naturally, suspect the newsletter provider can be using your data fraudulently, selling or renting your address in an illegal way. How you can tell if this is the case?

To find out, you can use a couple of not very well known tricks that GMail, the terrific free Webmail from Google, offers to you.

If you append the name of the newsletter provider -or any other identifier that makes sense to you- to your GMail user, using a '+' sign, the effect is that you still will receive the emails sent to this new address in your normal GMail account, but you can unequivocally identify the origin of the email thanks to this appended identifier.

So, let's say that you own the myname@gmail.com address and want to subscribe to a newsletter called 'My Pet today' or something. You can subscribe using your normal address plus an identifier, for example:

myname+MyPetToday@gmail.com

After doing this you will receive all the email from this provider in your normal account, but with the new identifier appended. In this way you can filter the incoming email and classify it accordingly. What is much better: if you start to receive email in this "artificial" account which is not from "My Pet Today", you can know for sure that they are using your account for sending you not solicited email and delete it automatically. Great!

Other interesting GMail idiosyncrasy is that it does not support dots ('.') in addresses. When one or more are added to a GMail address they are stripped out before delivered. Due to this behavior, all these addresses are equivalent:

yourname@gmail.com, your.name@gmail.com, y.o.u.r.name@gmail.com

and the like :-)

You can use this "feature" to distinguish between senders that don't accept the '+' sign in your email address and therefore make the previous tip useless.

Remember too that GMail has another alternative domain, googlemail.com, that is exactly the same as gmail.com. So, you can use myname@googlemail.com as an alternative address to receive important e-mail from sources you trust, friends, and so on, keeping the classic one (@gmail.com) for other purposes.

If you use gmail's incoming filters wisely you can easily get your important mail classified, your not wanted e-mail deleted and discern who is fooling you selling or renting your email address.

Hope this helps

JM

About a month ago I wrote a post about buying lists in the Internet and why this was a bad idea.

Today I received a question from one of our customers about renting a list and the convenience of doing this.

Rented lists are different from selling lists in that, in the first case, you don't get access to the data in the list but the provider sends your email on your behalf to its own list of recipients. You must trust a lot the provider or otherwise you can not be sure that the list has a good quality and the recipients have given permission for receiving this kind of e-mails.

Companies that grow lists for renting generally get their recipients from vertical portals or from some specific websites. Probably this people give permission to these portals to send them e-mail from them or their customers and partners, but think about the consequences of the owners of the list sending an e-mail on your behalf: The recipients will not know you and probably get annoyed and click the “report spam” button. And most important: they didn’t give you explicit permission to send them any e-mail.

Sounds this familiar to you?  Yes, it's the definition of spam: unsolicited e-mail.

Does this mean that this against the law? Not necessarily, but the point here, as always, is not only if it’s against the law (that’s supposed to be), but if it is against your own interests.

You will probably pay a good bunch of bucks for using the list, and you are surely getting a real low response for the emailing, and therefore a small ROI from the investment. And worse, your brand could be damaged if people think you’re a spammer. You don’t have a clue if the list is heavily used and consequently people in the list are angry about receiving your e-mail.

So the conclusion in (again) that you must not rent lists for emailing.

If you really need to grow your subscriptions’ list fast you can try to advertise in a vertical portal newsletter, co-brand it or make co-registration. But renting or buying a list is always a bad thing to do.

As always, I recommend that you grow your own in-house permission list (some tips here and here). It’s slow and painful, but it’s the only way to get results. In e-mail marketing always think in quality, not in quantity (more is less), and don’t forget that the most important asset you have is your brand and reputation, so don’t get a chance to drive it to a dead end.

In case you don’t want to hear my advice please review this interesting article by Jeanne Jennings: “Renting E-Mail Lists: What to Ask Before the Send”, and the ten rules of thumb for rented lists of Marketing Sherpa.

A recent study by Q Interactive and Marketing Sherpa (read in Marketing Charts) reveals how the meaning of the term “spam” has lately changed for users, in a way with high impact for us as marketers.

The survey sought to determine consumers’ perceptions of what spam is, why they report emails as spam and what they think happens when the “report spam” button is clicked.

The main conclusion is that now spam means “unwanted e-mail”, in contrast with the traditional “unsolicited commercial e-mail”.

That’s a huge difference for us. This means that, now more than ever, your content must be relevant. You must engage with your recipients or will have a big chance to be blacklisted by the most important ISPs, such as Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail.

The reason is that, according to the study, people misunderstand the implications of hitting the “Report spam” button omnipresent in all mayor webmail apps. Take a look at these figures and start to tremble:

• 43% of consumers, miss advertiser-supplied unsubscribe links in email and simply use the ISP’s “report spam” button to unsubscribe from an advertiser’s list - regardless of whether the email fits the consumer’s definition of spam.
• 21% use the “report spam” button to unsubscribe from email that they specifically do not consider spam.

“What this survey uncovered is a major disconnect in consumers’ understanding and use of the ‘report spam’ button, as well as consumers’ definition of spam from ‘I didn’t sign up for it’ to ‘I don’t like it’—all of which signal that the current system of email spam filtering is a broken process” said Matt Wise, president and chief executive officer of Q Interactive.

Q Interactive suggests that ISPs’ “report spam” button be replaced with those that more clearly indicate consumers’ intentions, such as an “unsubscribe” button and an “undesired” button.

And that means a lot more of effort for marketers too: much more targeted and relevant content. It has been the better way to go in the past and, naturally, it has become the only way to go now.

Read the full review at Maketing Charts.

A recent survey taken by the e-Commerce and Direct Marketing Association of Spain (FECEMD) on 400 companies in the IT business reveals some worrying information about e-mail and spam filters.

The study shows that a 30% of e-mail sent by these companies to customers or prospects is rejected by corporate spam filters. This includes marketing emails, newsletters, and transactional messages. The study also estimates that this situation leads to a 20% decrease in sells for those companies.

Too much restrictive e-mail policies in the default configuration of filters is the main reason for this to happen, according to this study. In fact the FECEMD does not discard to file suit against those spam-filter companies that not take more seriously the effect of these restrictive policies, as long as this is a hurdle in the development of the Internet in the country.

You can check the study at the FECEMD website (automatic translation form Spanish, sorry) :-(

The original document in Spanish.

What do you think? Are they exaggerating the problem? Is due to bad e-mailing policies or it really has to do with those spam filters? Leave your comments.

Last week, in an e-mail marketing training I taught, I was talking about permission e-mail marketing and what it implies, that's grow your own home list. One of the main concerns people had is that going this way it's going to take ages to grow a good list. And that's true: it is a hard and long-time task that deserves all your attention and care.

The first temptation everyone experiments is to google a little bit in order to find a way to buy a list from someone else. That's a very bad idea.

There are a lot of reasons for not doing that, but the main is that - ethics and law apart- for the same reason you can buy it, anyone else can buy it too. So, there is no control over who can send mail to the list and how many times. Does it sound familiar to you? Yes, that's plain spam.

One typical list has an obsolescence rate that ranges from 15 to 30% in a year. That means that if the list you buy is one year old and it has 100.000 e-mails in it, you will probably get some 20.000 or more bounced mails when you use it. And probably it will be older and unusable.

Besides, these lists are normally made by e-mail spiders. These are special applications that sniff web pages in search of e-mail addresses. A lot of web pages have "honey pot" addresses. They are in the HTML code of the page, but they're not visible for the visitors, only to the e-mail spiders. When someone sends an e-mail to this "honey pots" the sender is added to a black list and is considered a spammer, because the only way that you may know this address is by using an illegal e-mail collector. So, if you use a list that, no doubt, will have several of this "honey pot" addresses you'll end up in a lot of black lists out there, damaging forever your reputation and your deliverability.

So the moral is: Grow your own permission list. It's hard and it takes time, but is a guarantee of quality, legitimacy and good practices. In this case less is more. Never ever buy or download an e-mail list. And if you do, please don't use MAILCast for your e-mailings :-(

Phishing , as you may know, is a kind of fraudulent e-mail that tries to steal your authentication data supplanting the identity of your bank or other provider you trust. The attacker sends you an e-mail telling you that, for security reasons or whatever, you must click in a link and enter your credentials.

I'm suspicious every time I get an e-mail with words like "Important security notice" or similar in the subject. A trustworthy provider (your bank or on-line retailer) is never going to ask you for your security credentials, so be suspicious of those emails that tell you to do so.

A couple of days ago I received one of this phishing attempts, and then decided that I'd like to analyze it briefly in order to show you the basics of its behavior. You will learn how to identify it easily.

I received an e-mail supposedly from Amazon.com, an on-line retailer that I use a lot. Here you can see the full text of the e-mail (click to enlarge):

As you can see it's a classical phishing message. It tells you about a supposed security problem, and asks you to fix it by the means of login to your account and notify. The smart thing about this message is that it says that someone attempted to login to my Amazon account several times from a foreign IP. I buy a lot in Amazon.co.uk (although not in Amazon.com) and my IP is foreign to them because I don't live in the UK, so it makes sense.

However one always needs to be smarter and take a second and more profound look.

If you move the cursor above the link in the e-mail, you'll notice in the status area of your browser (see the red rectangle in the picture) that the real URL it is pointing to is very different from the original. A clear clue for phishing. This is difficult to spot in a non-webmail client such as Outlook. If you click un this link you will find a clone of the original Amazon.com site, so you probably won't notice the difference. Danger!

The other important thing to notice is that, although the sender reads "Amazon.com", if you see the real address (moving the cursor above its name) it's, in fact, zfuzvq@lycos.co.uk, as you can see in this picture:

If I'd had clicked in the link and entered my credentials I'll end up giving them to someone (probably) in the far east who will get access to all my information in Amazon, and probably would have charged some books into my account. Imagine what she could do if the phishing were related to my bank account! :-(

Conclusion: be extremely careful with e-mail about security issues. Before clicking on a link always check the real URL it is pointing at. And check the real sender of the e-mail too to be sure that it's from the same domain as your provider.

In life, most of the times, things are neither black nor white, but grey. And so it happens in e-mailing.

You have probably heard of the terms Whitelisting and Blacklisting. Both are special kind of lists you can have in your e-mail client (or even in the server). There, you note down e-mail addresses of people who you always trust or who you don't want to hear of, respectively.

In this way you keep a couple of lists to separate the good from the evil. When you receive an e-mail which is clearly spam, you add the sender to the blacklist, so that you will never receive anything from her. On the other hand, you add to your Whitelist the e-mail addresses of friends, colleagues, and everyone who is always welcome to your inbox.

These kinds of listings are very ineffective for several reasons, mainly because:

1. - It's a pain to keep them updated.

2. - Spammers generally use random generated sender addresses (name and domain), so the effectiveness of Blacklists is very limited, because each time the same spammer could be anyone.

3. - A lot of viruses and e-mail harvesting malware use the infected user's e-mail address as the sender for their e-mail. So, if one of your trusted senders is infected you will receive a lot of spam or viruses and your Whitelist will do nothing for you in this case.

So, what can we do?

There is a mid-term solution which is neither white nor black: it's grey! It's called Greylisting. It works this way: the first time someone send an e-mail to your server she gets banned with a transient error. Legitimate servers always try to deliver again e-mail several minutes later, and this second time the receiving server will let the e-mail go in. In addition it will put the sender in a greylist for a couple of days, and it will be trusted during this period. This works extremely well with spam because most of spam programs (and a lot of other not well designed bulk e-mail programs) just do "fire and forget", and if e-mail is not delivered at first chance they will not retry later.

So, again, grey is always better than black or white, and with such a simple trick you get rid of a huge percentage of your spam.

Of course, MAILCast supports grey listing retrying so that you will never miss the chance of delivering your law-compliant e-mail to your customers.

And now, just for laughs, a little bit of humour... This great comic strip from Dorktower shows the way spammers think of us ;-)

It would be really fun if not were for the problem spam really represents these days :-(

Spam is a real problem nowadays. A huge amount of the e-mail trasfered nowadays is unsolicited e-mail (spam).

In my inbox, for example about 70% of the daily e-mail I receive is just spam. We're lucky because we have a good anti-spam filter that classifies and sweap most of this rubbish out of the real inbox, but... How good an anti-spam filter is?

Altough it might seem obvious to you, the main thing you want to know about an anti-spam filter is that it is accurate. I mean that a filter is almost unuseful if it not only deletes spam but deletes good mail too. That is what is called "false positives". A false positive is a legitime e-mail flagged as spam by your spam filter.

A filter that doesn't catch spam is bad, but a filter that catches too much spam (I mean, does false positives) is even worse.

It's all about balance. As it is often saind in civil engineering colleges: "To build a bridge that doesn't fall is very easy. The difficult thing is to build one that almost doesn't fall". That's true for spam filters too: "To make an anti-spam filter that filters all the spam is easy: just wipe out everythig. The difficult thing is to make one that catches just the spam" :-)

One of the best anti-spam filters we've seen is the one embedded in GMail, Google's free mail service.

We found that this is quite usual in many hosting providers, for example. A lot of people is confy because they know that their hosting provider is taking care of their spam but... at what extent? We usually found too much strict spam filters that delete a lot of legitimate e-mail without it's owner knowing it.

You must pay attention to this kind of problem. Tell your provider not to raise the filter level too much or maybe you'll end up losing an important email some day and get in real trouble.