The answer…
95% --> Yes, the eec should start a campaign to differentiate between spam and permission-based emails that are no longer wanted.
5% --> No, the eec shouldn’t get involved and focus its efforts elsewhere.

Now that that’s settled, we need your ideas on how we can build an awareness campaign to differentiate between spam and email that’s no longer wanted, and can lobby the ISPs for the adoption of unsubscribe buttons. Clearly we already have some ideas, but we need more, much more. Since we’re all marketers, I suspect that you have some killer ideas. So please share them, either here or you can contact me directly at chad@emailexperience.org.

Also, visit the eec homepage to answer the latest Two-Click Survey question:
How much do you segment your emails?

-->See more Two-Click Survey Results

I am in Montreal to speak with eec members Chris Carder from ThinData and Greg Cangialosi from Blue Sky Factory at Infopresse on Wednesday. And with that said, this even began like all others: Typical business trip travel plans. You probably know them well.

- Work late two days before leaving to wrap up loose ends at the office and get all work covered.
- One day before leaving, ensure all work is covered "in case of disaster."
- Day of travel, check voicemail and email right before plane takes off to see if unplanned disaster has occurred.
- Sit on plane trying to figure out why the plane cannot land any faster—in order to get to disaster
- Turn on cell and email as soon as possible and begin typing to mitigate issues.
- Short-term success! But need to get to hotel to get online ASAP to finalize items.
- Get to hotel, go to room, plug in all devices, logon to internet.

Yes, it was all a standard trip until the logging on part.

And then... I received the fastest spam email EVER! Less than 10 seconds after logging on, I received the email below.

I travel quite a bit, and usually after I am in a foreign country for a day or so, I will start to receive local spam—but never this fast.

Has this type of thing ever happened to you?

—Jeanniey Mullen

OK…I’ll admit it—I like to read spam sometimes. Not because I want to really see Britney Spears and Paris Hilton naked or purchase a Russian wife, but because I love looking at the messages to see the tactics taken. And sometimes, I have to tell you, I’m compelled to click through: Again, not because I want to order Viagra or other pharmaceuticals, or get the wire transfer from Nigeria, but simply because I’m curious. If spam is so popular, they must be doing something compelling to get people to read and click through. How can I learn from that?

So here is the latest spam email that has me intrigued: The email comes from a number of different people—real names, like Mark Smith—and the copy reads:

Hello! I am bored this evening. I am nice girl that would like to chat with you. Email me at nbhfq@mailmessageonline.info only, because I am writing not from my personal email. Hope you wanna see my pics.

—Jeanniey Mullen

Fellow eec blogger Chip House recently blogged some good points on email marketing sustainability in response Michael Specter’s recent article, “Damn Spam” in the New Yorker .

As Chip notes, Specter’s piece is a fascinating piece of historical reporting on the origin of spam. Too bad Specter misses the whole point of how the spam problem is being tackled today—and how, I believe, it will eventually be solved.

It’s really challenging, both from an intellectual as well as corporate resources standpoint—for receivers of all stripes—ISPs, universities, corporations, etc- to keep up with the spammers. Spam evolves. Specter reports, “Indeed, most anti-spam techniques so far have been like pesticides that do nothing other than create a more resistant strain of bugs.”

Return Path responded to the article by correcting Specter’s suggestion that using reputation analysis (i.e., Is this sender good or bad?) is susceptible to gaming by spammers in the same way that content filters (i.e., does this email look or read like spam?) are today. We also blogged about it here.

Our response was written by Return Path CEO Matt Blumberg and GM of Deliverability Solutions George Bilbrey. Since they are a lot smarter than I am, I quote their letter in part:

“In fact, reputation metrics, if used well, are impossible to fake for more than 24 hours. A server that sends email that garners lots of complaints from recipients cannot make those complaints disappear. A server that has a spammy configuration (like open proxies or open relays) can’t fake those technical settings. Spammers can, and do, switch servers and IP addresses, but these “no reputation” IPs are viewed with suspicion by receivers until they accumulate enough data on them to develop a reputation.

Even if they spend time up front establishing a good reputation by using good sending practices, no true spammer can ever get or keep a good reputation—a standard that is increasingly becoming the only path to inbox placement. But, legitimate email marketers—retailers, publishers, non-profits and others—can establish good reputations that make sure that consumers get the email they sign up for and want to receive. Reputation systems offer the best of both worlds—a decrease in unwanted email and a decrease in false positives. For this reason, more and more internet service providers and corporate email administrators are moving to reputation systems to stem the spam tide. While spam may never completely end, the improvement of these systems will surely have many spammers looking for a new line of work.”

—Stephanie Miller

In his recent article in the New Yorker , Michael Specter discusses the history of spam and some of the technologies that have sprung up to guard against it, as well as new tactics spammers are using to get around it. One uber-mathematic spammer determined there were “600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways to spell Viagra…” That is a great example of the tenacity of the spam community. They won’t give up, even if they have to increase their spam from billions to trillions a day to get just a few responses. The word that comes to mind for me is sustainability. How does a legitimate email marketer survive and sustain response rates when other forces are conspiring to de-legitimize email?

The truth is there are several ways to define your email campaign such that it is viewed differently than the filth.

Sustainability in an environmental sense hits me every day as I get my coffee at a local coffee shop. I try to bring my own cup rather than rely on another tree-diminishing, chlorine-whitened paper cup. Java Jacks, the local shop just around the corner from my house, posted a sign that says something like “Thanks for using your own cup – just our tiny shop used over 100,000 paper cups last year…help us reverse that trend.” That shop has to be just a tiny fraction of the paper cups used by Starbucks in a year. My point is that it took that sign at Java Jacks for me to really think about the impact even my few cups a week could have over a lifetime. Even my tree-hugging tendencies had been numbed by the simple ease and anonymity of choosing a paper cup.

Spammers have created that same numbness with much of the populace with email. Legitimate marketers have the opportunity (and I argue responsibility) to reverse rather than add to the trend and impression that all email is spam. Marketers that continue to slam away at inboxes with little analysis of what is happening at the other end risk looking more like a spammer than a sustainable business.

Here are a few ways to do so:

• Spammers rely on volume to get their sale. Legitimate marketers need to rely on permission and relevance. Via customer-selected opt-in preferences, behavioral observance and data analysis, marketers can achieve a solid ROI independent of volume of email sent.

• Purge old and inactive names. Spammers mail everyone. A marketer mails only those that are likely to respond. Mailing deeper cheapens your brand and sullies your reputation.

• Authenticate your email. Where spam = fraud, legitimate mail builds on the brand your company has built offline. Don’t let fraudulent phishing scams destroy customer perception of your email. By authenticating with SPF, Sender ID and DKIM, you’ll decrease the chance your customers will get ripped off by the latest scam pretending to be you.

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

DMA: FTC Spam Summit Best Practices Presentation Slides
See Jerry Cerasale’s presentation on best practices delivered at the July 2007 FTC Spam Summit.

Chad White: Reportlet - Retailers Missing Opportunities by Shunning Onboarding Emails
Only a handful of major online retailers ease new subscribers into their email programs.

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

Ken Magill was right: The recent FTC Spam Summit was a real snoozer. Maybe it was the oppressively humid weather in D.C. this time of year that’s conducive to snoozing. More likely, it was due to our own misplaced expectations that such an event could ever be more than a big “show ’n tell.” Never mind that we’d heard all the speeches and solutions before and that not much had changed since the last Summit. This simply wasn’t the forum for examining the truly systemic issues or questioning the wisdom of the industry’s strategies and tactics. Debating those things in front of a regulatory body simply wasn’t on the agenda, and it was probably unrealistic to ever think it could be.

Nonetheless, those are precisely the things we should be debating in our industry. Trevor Hughes of the ESPC set the stage by arguing that there are really two classes of spam—spam that is malicious and spam that is annoying. His point was that today’s real problem is with the malicious spam that comes from the bad players, not legitimate companies. The inescapable conclusion was that the answer isn’t further legislation since the bad players operate outside of the law anyway. While it's a good message for the FTC to hear as it considers further rule making under CAN-SPAM, it didn’t go far enough.

After acknowledging those two classes of spam, we should be talking about how to deal with them. No one disputes that both are undesirable, but applying the same tactics used to combat the malicious spam to that which is annoying is what produces “false positives” and endangers the reliability of the medium for legitimate commerce. In my mind, reconciling email security with legitimate commerce—balancing the scales—is the critical challenge facing our industry today. Admittedly, my attempt to address this challenge at the FTC Summit fell flat. (Right message, wrong forum.) Yet, I’m convinced this is the real debate we need to have. And we do need some new thinking about the roles that different stakeholders (consumers, ISPs and senders) can and should play.

If the FTC Summit isn’t the right forum, what is? We need a new blueprint for email. Where can we come together to debate the systemic issues and arrive at more coherent, comprehensive solutions that satisfy both our security and commercial concerns? We can’t continually parade into Washington, D.C., with nothing new to tell and nothing new to show. At some point, the FTC’s patience will wear thin…as it should. If industry wants to retain the latitude of self-regulation, industry must have more to show for its efforts. We’ll invite government intervention if we don’t.

—Dave Lewis

I wish there was a way to prevent spammers from going to business school. Actually, they have always been savvier marketers than many in the industry. The problem is, they’re trying to sucker consumers rather than engage them in a dialogue. In fact, one piece of fraudulent email, recently received by a colleague of mine went as far as posing as a friendly customer service representative. Great, now phishers know more about relevance and communicating “person-to-person” than many legitimate companies! This is the latest in what is becoming a major threat to consumers and financial companies everywhere.

The phishing email began:

Hi, my name is Corrine Montaguesizin* and I am with the Fraud Dept of Huge Bank* in New York. We ask you to check your online account status and announce any change of the data or any other unusual problem and contact the bank in regards to recent activity on your accounts. As soon as possible, please access your online account following the link below:

Check your online account

* names changed to protect the innocent

If you’re a marketer working for a bank or any company that possesses private information about your customers, be extremely careful about the type of data you ask for via email. If it has to go via email, by all means authenticate using Domain Keys, Sender ID and SPF. Ultimately, this is both about company-reputation preservation as well as consumer protection. Help your customers NOT get suckered.

—Chip House