Chip's Deliverability Tips

Does Sending Domain Impact Deliverability?

Email recipients put more weight on who the email is from than any other item when choosing which emails to open, which to delete and which to complain about.

Our “from address” testing shows an increase in open rates and click-through rates when the from name, from address and subject line are appropriately branded.  It also shows a reduction in spam complaints.

An Email Service Provider (ESP) should provide you a choice of how your from address is managed. Possible options for XYZ Brand include:

Option 1: news@xyzbrand.com

Option 2: xyzbrand@xyzbrand.com

Option 3: news@xyzbrand.espdomain.com

Option 4: xyzbrand@xyzbrand.espdomain.com

In options 1 and 3 above, the “name side” of the email address (left side of the @ symbol) isn’t branded. This is the first item I’d recommend testing in your business. We recently changed to option 2 (a branded email name) for several clients based on statistically significant tests showing a response increase and a complaint reduction when compared to option 1.

Options 3 and 4 are typical implementations with an ESP. Both options utilize a “sub-domain” of the ESP (espdomain.com), enabling the ESP to more easily support reply mail management or manage DNS issues such as Sender ID or SPF authentication (since they maintain control of the root domain).

How does using a different email domain from your own affect response rates and complaints?  The jury is still out. However, a recent Gartner survey of 5,000 online buyers found that more than 1 million consumers were scammed out of $925 million in 2004 because of phishing attacks. Think that makes consumers aware of the brands their emails come from? Of course it does.

If consumer reactions to spam and phishing are any indication, it would seem the best solution is one that doesn’t obfuscate your brand in any way. Leverage your asset and use your name in your from name, from address and subject line.

MI & UT Registries: Right Idea, Wrong Laws

Michigan and Utah aimed to protect children from objectional email content with their new "Child Protection Registry" laws, initially scheduled to take effect on August 1st, 2005. Problem is, these new state laws are fraught with security and compliance issues that likely will increase spam for children -- not slow it. Plus, as usual, this will harm legitimate businesses only (both in terms of time and money), but won't touch spammers who ignore laws anyway.

This article in USA Today agrees: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2005-08-21-email-children_x.htm

First, let me say I love the idea of being able to protect minors from email content regarding alcohol, tobacco, porn etc., because we all know they see too much of it these days -- and the web is at least partially to blame. Such is the idea behind the laws, and a stance against them clearly would be a tough platform for a legislator to defend. However, the implementation of them in MI and UT make it more likely that a spammer could get hold of a "children only" email list by "cleaning" a spamlist against the registry. So this law doesn't win on a security basis.

Second, the law also has failings on the basis of expense. Currently a mailer wanting to comply with these laws will spend 1.2 cents for each record on their file to scrub their list against both the MI and UT laws. This process would need to be repeated every 30 days. That means a company with even a modest-sized list of 100,000 names would spend $1,200 per month cleaning their list against the registry. Strike 2 on economics.

Finally, we have to look at the law from a legal standpoint. CAN-SPAM preempts any state law that has anything to do with spam or email. So, these laws should be preempted by CAN-SPAM. Strike 3.

With that said, compliance is now required as of 8/15 in Utah and is pending in Michigan. My recommendation for now is to comply if you are sending (or linking to) content minors shouldn't see. We are making tools available to our clients to do so since we may be living with these laws for some time.

The right way to reduce spam for kids?  Get behind email authentication technologies...

Phishing: A Call to Authenticate!

I recently saw these stats on the impact of Phishing (spammers fraudulently coaxing consumers into providing credit and other information). The time for email authentication technologies, such as Sender ID, SPF and DKIM has clearly arrived and is necessary to keep the email from its steady erosion in the eyes of consumers.

"--Survey: Phishing Increase In 2005 Is Eroding Confidence of Online Customers
The Gartner survey of 5,000 online buyers found that more than 1 million consumers were scammed out of $925 million in 2004 because of phishing attacks. In 2005, 34 percent of the world’s phishing sites are based in the U.S. China is home to 15 percent, followed by Korea at 9 percent of all phishing sites. The Anti-Phishing Working Group’s statistics show that active phishing sites increased by nearly 17 percent between April and May 2005. The group found 3,326 U.S. phishing sites in May 2005, compared with 1,142 in October 2004."

Sure SPF and Sender ID have some shortcomings with email forwarding, etc. But my recommendation is that all firms authenticate their email in some way this year -- especially true for businesses in the financial industry. The benefits have already begun to payoff with major ISP's all planning to check for authenticated mail in the near term. Get on board.

http://spf.pobox.com

www.anti-spamtools.org

http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys

Thanks for reading.

Chip