Brand Names Under Fire

Protecting your Brand in the New Email World Order

By Chip House, ExactTarget.

I received a phishing email today that made me smirk. The email pretended to be an “eBay Fraud Mediation Request,” saying that someone had used my account to make “fake bids” at eBay. Funny thing is, I don’t have an eBay account and the address the email was sent to, privacy@exacttarget.com, isn’t subscribed to anything—so it was clearly scraped from the web. The email then asked for me to provide my eBay account log-in information, which they would have no doubt captured for their own fraudulent operations.

This wasn’t a big deal to me, but it’s a big deal to those who believe scams like these (per www.anti-phishing.org, about 5% of recipients fall for this sort of scam), and an even bigger annoyance for eBay and other organizations that find their brands under fire.

Hopefully, sender authentication plans like SPF and Sender ID will begin to take hold with ISP’s soon, thereby allowing legitimate senders to better protect their brand names. But what about damage you do to your own brand via email? Don’t think it can happen? Think again. One type of blacklist gaining adoption is called a SURBL. These blacklists focus on domain names and links in an email, rather than IP addresses, as the key component of their filtering logic.

Historically, blocking has been done at the IP address level, affecting marketers with poor name capture policies or those that fail to capture proper opt-in permission. But an IP address isn’t intrinsically tied to a brand, whereas a URL and domain often is. With the increasing use of sender authentication and blocking technologies like SURBL’s, it is more difficult for a company to escape its past email missteps. A SURBL is a “Spam URL Realtime Block List,” and focuses not on message source, but message content—specifically URL’s used in unwanted email. For example, if the domain www.mycompany.com shows up on a SURBL it can destroy their deliverability and brand reputation. Also, since there isn’t a common procedure for removal of your URL, the problem can be difficult to correct.

Your company’s email practices may be creating skeletons in your closet that can damage your brand over time. Want to see if your brand is in peril? Plug your brand name into the “lookup” function on www.surbl.org and see what you get.

How does this affect you? My friends at Pivotal Veracity who offer phenomenal new technology for tracking email deliveries to top ISP’s recently completed a study on the topic of SURBL’s and deliverability. They found that emails containing a blocked URL were blocked entirely at 5 of the 20 ISP’s tested, while 7 ISP’s moved the email to the bulk folder. Also, their tests showed that emails with blocked URL’s were filtered to bulk or discarded at 50% of medium to larger enterprises. Pivotal Veracity’s new product, eBrand Monitor (also offered via ExactTarget’s Inbox Detective), helps companies detect blocking before it causes problems.

Still think sending unsolicited email can’t hurt your brand? Think again.

Until next time…

Chip

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[Jeff Chan]

Any legitimate mailer who finds their domain listed on SURBLs is welcome to submit a report to whitelist at surbl.org. They should include full and complete contact information for their organization, information about their sending servers such as IP addresses, a sample outbound message with full headers and full message body including URIs, and a description of their organization and its published mail practices, especially including published anti-spam policies. We typically unlist organizations that do not make large-scale use of spam.

Generally speaking those who don't spam will never get listed on SURBLs, and our false positive rate is very low.

Jeff Chan
http://www.surbl.org/

[Jeff Chan]

In case it's not obvious, whitelist at surbl.org is a slightly obfuscated email address. Unobfuscate it to send a removal request. That and other contact information is also mentioned on our site.

[Chip]

Jeff -

Thanks for posting your thoughts on whitelisting options at surbl.org! Clearly this is something that will be helpful to readers, and is not well known.

Regards,

Chip

[Mark Reynolds]

Chip,

I found your comments exremely helpful and this is an interesting topic.

Our subscription product www.emailreach.com is used by brand sensitive email marketers, we indeed find that they rarely appear on lists like surbl.org as a legitimate false positive. It is quite clear that these filters really are helping us to keep our inboxes cleaner with minimal repercussions.

Best,
Mark

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