It is a sad reality that there are unscrupulous folks who send spam and phishing emails. Some of the most authentic looking and most dangerous spam messages I have seen in my inbox have been from phishers trying to replicate financial services emails. These fake emails usually notify me that my account has been frozen and then encourage me to click on a link or to reply with personal information.

Recently I received a legitimate and noteworthy series of emails from Bank of America. Their first email introduced updates to their alert emails so that their customers could expect what to look for. The new features include a new look, personalization, a security checkpoint, alert information and more. I am sure Bank of America has been dealing with spoofed emails for some time now, so hopefully these changes will reduce security headaches and help stop the spammers.

The first educational email from Bank of America draws attention to the forthcoming  changes:

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For many years, the public impression of how email deliverability works has been shrouded in mystery. Most seem to assume that email service providers hire deliverability experts because they know some sort of ISP black magic — or even better, that they have a direct ‘Bat-Phone’ to call ISP postmasters whenever a problem arises. While ISP relations are still critical to ensuring high delivery rates, the days of relying solely on ISP phone calls or emails to fix delivery problems are a thing of the past.

It’s important to note these key issues about ISP postmasters:

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There really is a baby in that bath water.

I’ve never used that idiom before, but in this case, I feel compelled to use it in response to an article in BtoB Magazine that actually promotes the use of unsolicited commercial email (UCE). In the article, Gary Halliwell, CEO of NetProspex, says that “there’s nothing prohibiting a marketer from sending an e-mail to someone who hasn’t opted in. The recession has forced us to drop this etiquette.”

Everyone has a different definition of what spam is, yet I think we can all agree that at a baseline it starts with unsolicited commercial email — promotional messages sent to consumers who have not requested them. My feeling is that just because we are burdened by an economic recession right now does not give us license to abandon the principles of responsible, permission-based email marketing. By lowering our standards when the going gets tough, we risk losing our industry’s credibility with consumers altogether.

I’ll keep my underlying point here brief: PLEASE DON’T SEND SPAM! If you’re still new to email or striving for more education, please refer to these best practice guides which include recommendations and guidelines that the vast majority of the email industry follow:

• Direct Marketing Association US
• Direct Marketing Association UK
• Email Sender & Provider Coalition
• Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group

We have all experienced those times when you go on vacation only to return to an inbox that resembles a wasteland of outdated offers, now-irrelevant messages, and other cyber waste.

DailyCandy has a pretty cool feature to help avoid this mess altogether. They offer a feature where subscribers can pause their email subscriptions for a given duration of time. This is kind of like putting your postal mail delivery on hold while you are on vacation or suspending newspaper delivery (for those who still get a newspaper delivered!). Of course, this technology lends itself better to those senders who email daily, just like the USPS or newspaper companies.

This feature looks to be a win-win because:

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The idea of behavioral data affecting email sender reputation first surfaced three years ago, when AOL announced that dormant addresses would factor into sender reputation. AOL explained at the time that spammers create significant numbers of fake email addresses for the sole purpose of driving down complaint percentage rates. Even so, they said that this metric should never affect legitimate emailers who have genuine (human) email recipients.

The next phase of this concept was presented by Microsoft at the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance Conference in 2008 (PDF). Microsoft’s Anti-Spam General Manager indicated that in the future they would prefer to use recipient behavioral metrics like open-rates in addition to their other spam-related metrics to determine sender reputation. While the idea was still hypothetical at the time, the mere fact that they made these statements to a room full of email senders was worth noting.

Now, we have confirmation from Yahoo! that some of these same metrics that AOL and Microsoft have considered are now implemented into Yahoo!’s anti-spam reputation processes. Of course, we’ll never know exactly what percentage of non-openers or other behavioral factors will impact deliverability, but we can say with certainty that dormant addresses and inactive users are now playing a role in determining your Yahoo! inbox success.

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“Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren’t so exciting.”
- Bill Gates on spam

Every so often it is prudent to take a refresher on fundamental email marketing topics and best practices. CAN-SPAM, officially known as the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003, is one of the most important online marketing topics. To follow are some of the basic facts, principals and rules concerning CAN-SPAM legislation. But like most legislation, this is not a simple bill. I recommend reading the entire act to learn more details.

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In response to the news that two U.S. Senators have introduced legislation to stop unsolicited text messaging, it might be helpful to clarify whether unsolicited commercial texting is already illegal.

In 2004, the Federal Communications Commission released its Rules and Regulations Implementing the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003. The primary purpose of the rules governs commercial email sent to a mobile user with an Internet domain name. (eg; anything with an @’example’.com email address.)   However, the FCC clarified in this rulemaking that short message service/text messaging via an “automatic telephone dialing system” is prohibited under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which includes all phone numbers registered with the FTC Do Not Call Registry.

To be clear, ‘automatic telephone dialing systems’ are defined as “equipment which has the capacity (A) to store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator; and (B) to dial such numbers.”

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