Spam Resource
This is a question that I get asked often: If somebody sends an email message that is 100% images, does that design choice itself make the message more likely to get relegated to the spam folder? My short answer is no, not really, but it merits a discussion, so let’s dive into it a little bit deeper.First, let’s get this bit out of the way — YES, some spam filters will score emails higher (more spammy) if the image-to-text ratio is low – meaning that a message contains little text, but is chock full of images. SpamAssassin is an example of a filter that will note this in its filtering results. But while SpamAssassin can be good for “broad strokes” guidance for email senders, this is an example case where SpamAssassin’s filters give different results compared to the spam filtering engines of the biggest ISPs and mailbox providers like Gmail
Founded in 2003, Lashback is a company offering marketing compliance tools specific to things like ensuring that affiliates and marketing partners respect unsubscribes and do not misuse data. It’s not a realm I know a ton about — I personally was more familiar Lashback’s “UBL” – Unsubscribe Blocking List or Blacklist, a DNSBL they once published to identify IPs sending mail to addresses known to have previously unsubscribed. Anyway, if, like me, you were wondering what has happened to Lashback lately — the answer is, they’re still out there, and they were just acquired by a company called PerformLine. Read more about that here, or head on over to Lashback’s website if you’re looking to learn more about what they do.
DELIVTERMS: The (almost) weekly series here on Spam Resource that defines deliverability terminology. Today, the term and topic is CAN-SPAM.CAN-SPAM, aka “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003” is the US federal anti-spam law. It doesn’t explicitly prohibit spam, but it applies various requirements to commercial email messages sent in the US, and it includes provisions that do help (in my opinion) to push email senders toward opt-in as a best practice.Here on Spam Resource you’ll find a whole section of articles relating to CAN-SPAM, including why you should adhere to the prior affirmative consent standard (because then you don’t have to label your email as an advertisement), what constitutes a transactional message under CAN-SPAM, and I’ll also help you break down four common CAN-SPAM myths. Here I’ll also include links to the full text of the law and the US Federal Trade Commission’s CAN-SPAM
CloudKettle’s Eliot Harper is back! Last time, I linked to him talking about Global Unsubscribe handling in SFMC. This time, his topic is Marketing Cloud’s one-click unsubscribe functionality. If you know me, you know I tell people that one click unsub functionality can be inherently susceptible to bot clicks causing false unsubscribes — and Eliot suggests a configuration modification to help mitigate that problem! It’s not the way that I would have done it, but that’s definitely fine by me. He’s aware of the problem, he’s explaining the problem clearly, and he’s offering up a unique solution, and I’ll trust his logic here. Good thinking, good sir!Find the video here and don’t forget to check out his whole series!
Sendinblue is hiring! They’re looking for a “Technical Deliverability Manager, who will contribute to build the engineering vision, strategy on delivery/deliverability, and anti-fraud features of the company, but also will actively participate in handling Deliverability escalations from our Customer Care and Customer Success teams and participating into designing proper Deliverability onboarding for our key customers.”Could that be you? Click here for more information or to apply.
Jennifer Nespola Lantz’s recent post about Gmail potentially offering political senders a fast pass method to the inbox has gotten me thinking about the spam fight we went through back in the olden times. Before CAN-SPAM, domain reputation and deliverability best practices. There was a time back in those bad old days when the marketing industry mega-group Direct Marketing Association tried to convince the world that opt-out was the best path for email marketing. The arguments as to why this absolutely horseshit plan was supposed to be okay varied; free speech, growth of the economy, support for small businesses, whatever. Everybody should be allowed the chance to hit your inbox at least once, they said; and then you could just tell the sender; each sender, individually, to stop emailing you. They loved touting two things. First was an “opt-out registry” service called e-MPS. Smart netizens knew that allowing this to proceed would
Please join me in wishing a heartfelt CONGRATULATIONS to Matthew Vernhout on reaching a very significant milestone with his EmailKarma blog: 15 years! Matthew’s deliverability blog EmailKarma was born into this world way back in July 2007, and is still out there today, keeping us all updated with his news and views from the deliverability universe! Congrats, good sir!So many good blog resources come and go. People move upward, onward, or out of the industry and leave their websites behind. Or even worse, take them down. It’s a bummer when email marketing resources and good voices succumb to internet bit rot and I’m thankful for Matthew putting in the effort to keep EmailKarma active and up to date.Besides checking out his blog at emailkarma.net, be sure to stop on over to this Linkedin thread to wish him congratulations.(The screenshot is from August 2007, in case you’re wondering. Oh, blog designs were
Whatever became of AMP for email? Once upon time I tried to keep track of its current status, and it feels like that status hasn’t changed too much since then — particularly, still no Microsoft support.Chad S. White, Head of Research at Oracle Marketing Consulting, suggests that we should not write off AMP as a dead technology just yet. Click on over to read his article “Don’t Write Off AMP for Email Yet, Marketers” on CMSWire. There, Chad explains the challenges that have prevented broader AMP for email adoption, and how signs point to a potential for a successful path forward from here. I don’t want to spoil too much, but I will say that it’s nice to see increased Yahoo support!
ARC (Authenticated Received Chain) is an email authentication mechanism, sort of. The point of ARC is to encapsulate a check of email authentication results and include it in forwarded mail.If I receive email at an address, then I forward mail to another address, authentication results are difficult for the mail server at the second receiving site to interpret correctly. SPF works on a “last hop” methodology, meaning that a server doing an SPF check can only check the server that just connected to it — making it incompatible with email forwarding, because email forwarding involves more servers and thus more “hops.” A DKIM authentication signature is supposed to be compatible with email forwarding, but there are enough glitches out in the wild — encoding problems, rewriting headers for forwarding (or adding headers or footer text for mailing lists) that it just doesn’t work perfectly 100% of the time. And then
It’s been a long road, getting from there to here. Once wholly separate companies, Time Warner Cable, Bighthouse Networks (and a piece of long-bankrupt Adelphia Cable) are all now part of Charter Communications, and all lately branded as “Spectrum.”Deliverability guidance for the realm of Spectrum is sparse. They don’t publish a postmaster site and don’t seem to respond for requests for help. Per my prior investigation and information from Validity, they do use Cloudmark, and it’s possible to review bounce messages and/or identify Cloudmark fingerprinting in an attempt to troubleshoot delivery issues; but I wouldn’t count on being able to successfully request unblocking from somebody at Spectrum.What I can do is offer you this updated list of Spectrum email domains, so that it might help you segment and target if/when you are needing to clean up any list hygiene issues to improve deliverability to Spectrum.Here’s the most current list of