ISPs and spam tracking services like Spamhaus and SORBS rely on spamtraps or ‘honeypots’ to catch spammers – but what exactly is a ‘spam honeypot’ and how do you avoid hitting them? The bulk of the spamtraps and honeypots today are from dormant email accounts and/or closed domains. The logic is simple: a ‘dead email inbox can’t opt-in to receive email’, so anyone sending email to one of these spamtrap addresses is likely sending unsolicited email. ISPs (Yahoo.com, msn.com, gmail.com for example) review their list of email boxes regularly and disable accounts that have been inactive for a long period of time. They allow the addresses to sit disabled for six to 12 months – during which time any legitimate [...]
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Webinar: How a SPAM Firewall Works
Our first webinar - ‘Email Marketing 101′ focused on tips to improve delivery with a concentration on email content. In this Webinar, (aka “Why Good Emails Go Bad“) we take it up a notch and explain in detail, the end-to-end trials and tribulations of an email message as it flows from your outbox to (hopefully) the recipients inbox. This webinar is more technical. Our goal is to not only leave you with a dozen or so specific tips, but to help understand all the places where your email can get tripped up before finally hitting the recipient’s inbox. The topics include: How current Enterprise Email Filters work Tracking an Email from send to delivery: possible pitfalls along the way Designing for the [...]
10 Worst Performing Email Subject Lines
We already covered the top 10 Best performing headlines – so read, review and emulate. Since no top 10 ‘Best’ list would be complete without the corresponding ’10 worst’ list, here are the subject lines associated with the 10 worst performing emails campaigns, along with our opinion of what the recipient may have thought when they skimmed through their inbox.. and decided to delete the email instead of open it. Join Us for a FREE Webinar on April 2 2011! – Webinar about what? Why? From Whom? Aren’t most Webinars FREE? Shop Early and Save! – Oooh. Yet another promotional email. I’ve only received 219 of these today. – What will I be shopping for? Early for what? Save how [...]
What is Email “Phishing”?
You know those annoying emails that pretend to be from PayPal, EBay or the local bank, asking you to login to your account and validate your password or other credentials? Those are “phishing” attacks – you’ve officially been “phished”. According to Wikipedia: “Phishing is the criminally fraudulent process attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically done via email or instant messaging and directs you to enter details at a fake website that usually is almost identical to the legitimate one. Read more about phishing on Wikipedia.org
Install an SPF Record to Improve Email Delivery
This entry applies to anyone who will be outsourcing any of their outbound email sending from servers other than their corporate email servers. You are likely an IT person who had landed here because someone from the marketing department said ‘Hey IT dude – we started using an ESP and we want to maximize email delivery’. If you are using an Emails Service Provider (ESP) like Pinpointe, Constant Contact or Exact Target, then this applies. If you are just sending outbound emails from Outlook, then this does not apply. What is “SPF” and what does it do? SPF stands for “Sender Policy Framework”, and helps to control forged e-mail. SPF is not directly about stopping spam – it is about [...]
11 Common SPAM Content Mistakes
If you send email campaigns long enough, you will run into spam filter issues. As a legitimate email marketer you can still expect 20%+ of your emails to just get lost in cyberspace, mostly due to overzealous spam filters. SPAM filters / firewalls use multiple techniques to determine whether your legitimate business email is SPAM . Today’s filters rely heavily on your domain and server reputation, but most filters still factor in your email’s content, and are based on the spamassassin engine. Content-based filters review your content and assign points each time they see something that looks like a spammy phrase, and certain criteria get more points than others. If your campaign’s total “spam score” exceeds a certain threshold, your [...]
CAN SPAM Act: Update
During each of our Email Marketing Webinars, we get questions about CAN-SPAM regulations, so I thought it would be useful to review the CAN SPAM laws. You will note in this post that, contrary to popular belief, ‘opt-in’ is surprisingly not a legal requirement. Offering additional impetus for the timeliness of the topic: we just passed the five-year anniversary of the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act becoming official. It boasted overwhelming approval by the U.S. congress after six years of debate, creating the first federal law regulating spam. The CAN SPAM law went into effect January 1, 2004. Here’s a quick rundown of the law’s main provisions to keep in mind while sending out your email marketing campaigns. We’re [...]
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