Policy On Purpose

The Gmail Team announced impending changes to their user interface today that will have an effect on users of their desktop and mobile platforms. The changes deal with how mail in the inbox is sorted for review by the recipient. These changes will be rolling out over the next several weeks for everyone, or you can opt-in to test things out now by selecting "Configure Inbox" after clicking on the gear icon.

Currently, default users of Gmail see mail which is sorted into "Important and unread" and "Everything else." In the future, though, the desktop will look like this (taken from the...

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Yahoo has announced that they are closing down their Chinese email service. Any mail sent after August 19, 2013, may not be received by its intended recipient unless they have sign-up with Alibaba's AliCloud service (in which case mail will be received until the end of 2014).

This brings up a question that is similiar (but not quite the same) as one that we have dealt with previously when you had a domain that was in transition when a partnership was winding down: How do you deal with the shutdown of an entire domain?

In this case, you know that the domain is closing. You also know the date upon...

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This past week I happened to notice a blog post by Fab CEO Jason Goldberg. In it, Mr. Goldberg explains a decision that Fab recently made to send out a re-engagement email to people who had not opened an email in the previous 18 months. People who did not click through from this campaign to opt back into Fab's emails were unsubscribed from further emails.

The subject line was compelling: "Stop. Getting. So. Many. Emails. Smile, you’re designed to." Then, inside the email, they explained the purpose of the email and said that if the recipient wanted to continue to receive email that they needed...

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What is the easiest way to comply with ExactTarget's Anti-Spam Policy?

First things first... What is ExactTarget's Anti-Spam Policy? If you have a look at the policy, you'll find that we expect that our customers "will use our software only to send emails to customers and prospects that have directly consented (opted-in) to receive email."  In a nutshell, the answer is found in two simple words: "No surprises."

Clients often ask about the propriety of engaging in buying or renting lists, or engaging the services of an append house. All of these are against the Anti-Spam Policy.

To understand why,...

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When I am dealing with blocklist issues, it is not unusual for someone to ask me, "Well, why doesn't the blocklist operator just tell us what the spamtrap addresses are?" At first blush, this would seem to be an outstanding question.

But, the issue isn't really quite that simple. These lists of addresses are the bread and butter of the blocklist operator. (See, now the picture makes sense!)

Blocklist operators look at their lists of spam traps as sources of information--and the source of their livelihood. They view them the same way that journalists view their sources of information. In fact,...

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I recently got an email asking what we would call an email address that used to belong to a person but no longer does. The answer is that these addresses are still called "spam traps"--the big difference is that we have several categories of spam traps now.

These days, we seem to be dealing with three main types of spam traps:

1. "Pure" traps: These are accounts that never existed and aren't used to sign up for any mail streams. If they are published, they're published in hidden places (such as comments on web pages).
2. "Typo" traps: These are relatively new traps that we have had to start dealing...

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When running a re-engagement campaign, what's the most important part? Is it the email list or the creative? While there are rarely easy answers, this question gives an opportunity to look at one of the more important parts of your email program.

The short answer to this question is... the list. Re-engagement campaigns are notorious for low response rates, and with good reason. These are programs that tend to target poorly gathered and/or poorly engaged list segments--in other words, email addresses that aren't responding well to your offers to start with. While I have seen response rates...

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You need to be concerned about your sending reputation more than just about anything else. All of your policies should center around what impact they might have on your reputation, because that reputation determines your ability to successfully communicate your message to customers.

There are two different kinds of reputation that can be used: IP-based and domain-based. Each has advantages and disadvantages.

Many receivers use IP-based metrics and understand that different message streams go out over different IP addresses. IP-based metrics have the advantage of being pretty stable and allowing...

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One of the more common issues that we deal with when helping clients who have been hit with a Spamhaus SBL listing is getting rid of spam trap addresses. These addresses are email addresses that are not actually owned by a person (and in fact, may never have been owned by someone). Instead, they only exist to receive email that the owner (Spamhaus, in this case) considers to be spam.

The great problem of spam trap removal is that no one knows which addresses on a list are actually spam traps. Thus, it is impossible to say which addresses must be removed. The owners of the spam traps will not...

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Recently, we have received an inceasing number of questions about the identification requirements found in the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL). Usually the question relates to whether our clients are required to identify ExactTarget in emails they send to Canada, and if so, how they should go about doing so. Fortunately, this is a question we’ve seen before and one that has recently been clarified.

In May 2011, Al Iverson wrote to Shaun Brown of Canadian law firm nNovation LLP. Shaun’s full answer is very instructive, but the short version is:

"It is my personal view that ESPs, ad agencies, etc....

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Earlier this year, I told you that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) had issued final regulations regarding its part of implementing Canada’s new anti-spam law (CASL). The CRTC issued two new, additional sets of guidelines regarding those rules on October 10, 2012. If you haven’t read the previous post concerning those requirements, you should probably read that first (and even if you have, you might want to review it before continuing).

In “Compliance and Enforcement Information Bulletin CRTC 2012-548,” the CRTC sets out guidelines regarding who and what...

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In case you haven't heard the news: Wanadoo.nl and Orange.nl were a joint venture between T-Mobile and France Telecom, but that joint venture is now over, and these domains are about to transition back to ownership by France Telecom. As a result, they will stop accepting mail on 1 August. You can read the announcement here (and they even have a FAQ on the transition as well).

What does that mean for people who are sending mail? In this case, not a whole lot. This is a transition that T-Mobile appears to have thought out pretty well. Each user has already been changed to a new email account that...

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Forward to a friend campaigns are a popular means of spreading the word about a product or service. They're also very tricky ground to tread with some hidden dangers.

There are two issues that surround responsibility for forward to a friend messages: (1) content and (2) consideration. As Al Iverson briefly notes, the FTC has gone after senders who did not allow their customer to control substantially all of the content of the message that was to be "forwarded" in their name.

An issue that has come up several times recently, though, involves the concept of consideration for sending the message...

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The Cassels Brock Report has reported that Canada's new anti-spam law isn't expected to come into effect until 2013.

They quote the Canadian Minister of Industry as saying in a speech given on April 24, 2012, that they expect the law “to take effect next year”. Part of the hold up, of course is that we still don’t have the final regulations from Industry Canada. They could come out any time now, but given this development, I think that Industry Canada is taking its time about things so we might be in for a longer wait.

Keep checking back as our email deliverability team continues to monitor this...

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The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) released the final form of its regulations on March 5, 2012. You can see them for yourself in the Canada Gazette (Canada’s version of the United States’ Federal Register). They are printed in the March 28, 2012 edition. This version is not a call for comments, but rather the release of the actual rules after considering the comments made in response to their prior “Call for comments on draft Electronic Commerce Protection Regulations” which was released last July.

These regulations are not much different than the...

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Policy decisions by administrators at domains that receive mail can often have an adverse impact on your ability to send mail. These policies may result in changes to the message being sent that can cause things to work in a manner in which they are not intended.

One example of this phenomenon is seen in mail sent to United States Army domains. We have recently been made aware that links in mail sent to addresses which end in us.army.mil have been broken. One of our deliverability consultants reached out to the postmaster there and received the following reply:

Links within the us.army.mil...

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The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) released its “Call for comments on draft Electronic Commerce Protection Regulations” on June 30, 2011.  The Call for Comments stands in roughly the same place as a United States government agency’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.  They are the CRTC’s notice that they have figured out what rules they want people to follow under a specific statute.  In this instance, we’re talking about Canada’s Anti-Spam Law (CASL), which was given royal assent on December 15, 2010.

The Call for Comments does not give any explanations for the...

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One of the hottest topics in the areas of privacy and policy lately has been the "Do Not Track" proposal found in the FTC's latest privacy report: "Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: A Proposed Framework for Businesses and Policymakers".  In fact, this one topic has completely overshadowed all of the other things mentioned within the report.


Last week, AdWeek published an op-ed by FTC Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch.  Commissioner Rosch pointed out that the FTC has not actually endorsed any particular Do Not Track mechanism:

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