Friendly Fire in the War on Spam – Part 3: The boy who cried SPAM

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

There are many people out there who run legitimate email newsletters. Newsletters provide useful information to subscribers and they are a great way for companies to stay in touch with their client base. Those who send newsletters have to be very careful about how they handle their mailing lists. Most people who send newsletters are careful and concerned about stopping spam. The CAN-SPAM act is a good starting point, but those who care about their customers agree that these are probably the most important "best practices" for sending email newsletters:

• Use a self-managing mailing list or service
• Include unsubscribe instructions with every email you send
• Require a double-opt-in for new subscribers (Double opt in refers to the process of signing up for a newsletter then requiring a confirmation response from the email address that was sent. This way an email address cannot be added by an imposter)

Even with all these precautions legitimate emailers get flogged as spammers. But these are skilled, tech-savvy people who seriously oppose spamming. How can they be accused of spamming when they've been so careful? The sad answer is that it happens when a legitimate newsletter is flagged as spam by one of their own subscribers.

The double-opt-in signup makes it impossible for an email address to be accidentally added to a mailing list. Someone has to choose to subscribe and then verify their wish to subscribe. But a month later, they may have forgotten all about it. They complain to an ISP about this spammer or hit the "Spam" button on their email client. Just like that, the emailer has been accused of spamming. The consequences of being accused of spamming can be drastic and swift, often resulting in non-delivered emails and blacklisting. The anti-spam movement is so strong right now that an ISP might immediately deny service to the newsletter sender. This happens without any crime being done, without any proof, and without any warning to the person managing the newsletter.

What's most alarming about this problem is that there really is no defense against it. This is a problem that is totally out of the control of people who use email legitimately. Email recipients have been empowered to take on spam. People have a lot of rage when it comes to spam and they have no qualms about practicing mob justice. Apparently the AOL email interface is particularly empowering when it comes to accusing spammers by providing a large spam button… that has serious consequences.

The only solution may be to abandon email newsletters all together. As RSS technology becomes a part of the daily lives of mainstream internet users we ca see an alternative to using email to deliver content. There can be no argument about who is subscribing to RSS information. The recipient requests the information only when they want to, or when their reader has been programmed to.

Interestingly this corresponds nicely with the advent of blogging. Blog content authoring tools can easily be directly liked to RSS feeds. By inviting site visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed, they get a much greater amount of anonymity and you get a huge drop in stress and no possible way of being accused of spamming. But for the moment, you can't reach the same audience with RSS that you can with email. But t writing is on the wall. RSS, or more precisely the idea of RSS as a means of people gathering up information that they like will likely replace the "pushed" architecture of the email newsletter in time.

Friendly Fire in the War on Spam – Part 2: Blacklists

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

There are several organizations that maintain blacklists of IP addresses that send out spam. Internet service providers (ISPs) subscribe to these lists to filter out email that comes from these sources. The idea being that this will keep spam from being delivered to their email users. There is no silver bullet for spam and this can be a heavy-handed practice. It works fine when email comes from a private IP address, but what if someone with a large ISP email address, like yahoo.com, starts sending out spam? Should the originating IP address be blocked? This could block every email that comes from a yahoo.com email address. There are plenty of legitimate non-spamming users who have @yahoo.com email addresses. I use yahoo as an example, but this could be applied to any ISP. Most blacklist managers are aware there are large numbers of legitimate users out there and generally do not blacklist larger service providers without good reason. An example of a good reason is when an email service provider shows a total inability to monitor and control spam that originates from their network. This is a real problem for email service providers. Naturally they want customers but at the same time they must monitor and deny service to customers who are spammers. They effectively have to look for customers to turn away. Never the less, no ISP should tolerate spamming in their network. It has serious repercussions on their legitimate users. If an ISP becomes blacklisted, legitimate customers don't get the service they pay for.

Legitimate email users should be aware of this. If your ISP harbors spammers or is soft on spam, there is a chance that your ISPs IP addresses will be added to a blacklist or has been added already. These may well be the same IP addresses that you use to send email. As a result, your email can be labeled as spam, regardless of the content. The best defense is to use an ISP that has a strong anti-spam policy and avoid working with the ISPs on this list.

Get out of there:
You should avoid ISPs that are "spam friendly" or "spam infested." There are plenty of ethical considerations but they should be avoided for tangible reasons. Spam exploited ISPs generally suffer from poor server performance and lost emails. You can also become associated with spammers just by your relative proximity to each other on the internet. This can lead to frustrating returned emails and long sessions arguing with blacklist managers and your ISP to get the common IP address you share with spammers released. The best bet is to avoid these ISPs all together.

Newsletter Problems:
Blacklists can be a major problem for those who send out email newsletters. One of the things many email newsletter management services don't talk about is their delivery rate. Because newsletter services send out so much email their IP addresses are constantly fighting a battle against being blacklisted. Most of the time newsletter services are in the right. It's usually a case of an email behaving like spam or one of their customers making a mistake that trips a flag. This can lead to the newsletter service provider having their IP address blacklisted.

What you need to know is whether or not the IP addresses of your newsletter service provider have been blacklisted. Some services never make any claims to their delivery rate, only how many emails you're allowed to send… with no assurances that your email will ever arrive. One service provider that does speak about this issue is Constant Contact who takes managing the reputation of their IP addresses quite seriously.

Friendly Fire in the War on Spam – Part 1: Filters

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Not only is spam incredibly frustrating, it continues to hamper legitimate business in new ways. Sending out honest email newsletters is becoming increasingly difficult for a number of reasons. Most of these are the direct result of entanglements with tools and protocols that are in place to protect users from spam.

A big problem with spam prevention today is that most anti-spam software can report "false positives" where legitimate email is labeled and treated like spam. The spam filtering software looks over an email message if it fits the profile of spam. This can be done at the server level, an IT department's Exchange server, or at the client level, a copy of Outlook or Eudora on a desktop. The problem is that determining what is spam and what isn't spam is a very delicate job. Unfortunately most anti-spam software just isn't up to it. You run the risk of either tossing legitimate email in the trash without seeing it or only eliminating a small fraction of incoming spam. Granted that cutting out half of the spam you receive is a positive step but it's hardly an ideal solution especially when you loose real email in the process.

Dealing with incoming spam:
In my experience, most anti-spam software causes as much hassle as it prevents. This is especially true for people like me who depend on email for new business leads. Those of us in this situation simply cannot afford a false positive because that costs us business. For a long time my solution was to run a spam filter on my email client at a low level. Set this way it would flag obvious spam and let the rest through to my inbox for me to deal with. I still had a ton of spam coming into my inbox but it wasn't quite as bad. Even with a low grade filter I had to skim through my spam folder once per day to look at hundreds of emails to avoid throwing out something important.

The problem with these types of filters is that the software is making a guess. Emails that have blank subjects or subjects like "hello" or "hey" look a lot like spam. Heaven help you if you actually happen to be in the mortgage business or work for Pfizer.

Better than filters:
Since software isn't up to the task of determining what is spam and what isn't spam what can we do? Cloudmark has developed a unique and quite brilliant solution to the problem. Rather than rely on software to make judgment calls on what is or isn't spam, Cloudmark leverages the opinions of millions of email users. Here's the process in a nutshell: The vast majority of spam is a basic message that gets sent to a large number of people. Everyone with Cloudmark's software has the option to mark an email as spam. When a message gets marked, Cloudmark reads this as a "vote" to label a message as spam. When a message gets enough "votes" Cloudmark's software gets updated and removes future occurrences of that message from everyone's mailbox. The genius of this is that Cloudmark only marks something as spam if several people have marked it. If you get a new business lead from an individual, there is no way that email can be flagged as spam by Cloudmark because it is a unique message. No one else has received the email other than you, so no one else could have marked it as spam. No more false positives!