Caught In Their Own Underwear This is, as Brad says, priceless. According to PC World, verification emails sent by the challenge/response anti-spam technology from Mailblocks, Inc., which is now owned by AOL, are being blocked by…you guessed it, AOL (and Earthlink, too). Read the full article here. This is a little embarrassing for AOL, but it really underscores the continuing problem in the world of email, spam, and anti-spam systems: false positives. It’s almost impossible, with the moving targets of technology, consumer complaints, and aggressive spammers, to get filtering right 100% of the time. We all know the multi-faceted solution is out there somewhere (authentication, reputation, monitoring, improving permission and mailing practices, legislation and enforcement, etc.), but the industry hasn’t…
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
For Whom the Bell Tolls I don’t understand why everyone in the world hasn’t yet signed up for VOIP services from companies like Vonage. We just did it a couple of weeks ago at home. In terms of quality, it’s virually indistinguidhable from a POTS land line. You can have as many numbers as you want on the same account. TiVo works with it. You can keep your old phone number. There are no minimums and no contracts. They don’t have to come to your house to get it to work. They’ve even figured out how to get 911 and 311 to work with it. It’s got tons of other cool features, as well, but even if all you do…
Why Email Will Win the Day
Why Email Will Win the Day I attended the same presentation as Fred where a great B2C marketer talked about how she got a 40:1 payback for every dollar spent on email marketing versus an 8:1 payback on search. As head of an email marketing company, it was music to my ears. But the “finite issue” Fred highlights is actually a great opportunity more than it is a drawback. Most marketers still have email addresses for less than 25% of their full customer database, meaning that if we do our job as an industry, we should be able to increase the availability of email addresses threefold in the coming couple of years. With the inevitable scale efficiencies in email marketing,…
It’s Up There With Air and Water Now
It’s Up There With Air and Water Now A study on “web withdrawl” conducted by Yahoo and OMD confirmed that most people are now so accustomed to using the web that they have problems when internet access is taken away from them. Nothing too earthshattering, but it’s an interesting quick read. My favorite part: one person reported that he even missed getting spam. Now THAT’S a sign that it’s time to get outside and enjoy some fresh air.
Spam: Crisis, or Approaching Denoument?
Spam: Crisis, or Approaching Denoument? A few interesting comments on this front today. Fred says the crisis is over, everyone should just calm down. Pamela says spam filtering technology is getting really good now. And I had lunch with Saul Hansell from The New York Times today, who thinks that authentication will make a monumental difference. [For those of you who read OnlyOnce and aren’t super technical, authentication is the newest trend that ISPs are starting to employ to snuff out spammers. In a nutshell, it’s a technology like Caller ID that lets an ISP verify who’s sending the mail so they can shut it down if the mailer is clearly a bad guy (or someone who blocks Caller ID).]…
RSS and Email's Demise, Continued
RSS and Email’s Demise, Continued Thanks to my colleague Tom Bartel, I discovered two good postings this week that I thought I’d pass on. The first one by Ed Brill talks about Email vs. RSS and is a great contribution to the debate. It has some similar thoughts to my original posting about Prepping RSS for Prime Time. The second one by Christopher Knight is entitled 22 Reasons Why Email Is Not Dead and is a great contribution to the dialog I contributed to in my Rumors of Email’s Demise posting a while back.
Authentication and Spam
Ok, privacy/anti-spam guru Anne Mitchell and journalist extraordinaire Pamela Parker have both said it: SPF — and Sender ID, and Domain Keys, and any authentication protocol) for that matter — are not about stopping spam. I agree with both and want to emphasize Pamela’s main point, that authentication is the next layer of protection in the war against spam, not the end game. It will work with legislation and other methods currently employed to set the stage for the next wave of solutions, around mailer reputation. More on that in the weeks to come.
New Media Deal
Americans have long operated under an unwritten deal with media companies (for our purposes here, let’s call this the Old Media Deal). The Old Media Deal is simple: we hate advertising, but we are willing to put up with an amazing amount of it in exchange for free or cheap content, and occasionally one of those ads slips through to the recesses of our brain and influences us in some way that old school marketers who trade in non-addressable media can only dream of. Think about it: – 30 minutes of Friends has 8 minutes of commercials (10 in syndication!) – The New York Times devotes almost 75% of its total column inches to ads – We get 6 songs…
Baby and Bathwater Redux
Katie Hafner’s article in the New York Times Circuits section today about spam and false positives is right on the mark. Spam filters are still evolving, and spammers are evolving right with them. Although the flood of spam is largely stemmed by a good filtering app, the results for consumers are still spotty: false negatives are irritating, false positives can be very painful (as the article suggests), and the process still consumes a little too much time. While the article nails the consumer problem, it does miss the corresponding business problem around false positives (see below). But things are getting better. While I wrote generally about how email is here to stay a couple weeks ago, there are a couple…
Challenge Response: Oy!
I don’t think the news about AOL buying Mailblocks and its challenge response anti-spam product is such a big deal in the grand scheme of things. But it does give me a quick opportunity to rant against challenge/response. First, I don’t think the world is in danger of mass adoption of challenge/response. Earthlink, which in general has much more sophisticated customers than does AOL, has had a hard time gettings its adoption level of this up to the 7-10% level over a period of at least two years. I think it will be even tougher for AOL. I applaud AOL for trying to do more to help members fight spam, but I don’t think this is the answer. So onto…
Whatever Happened to "The Customer is King"?
B2B published a synopsis of an unbelievably pathetic study last week, which I’ll excerpt here in case that flaky-looking link doesn’t work: More than 50% of global brands fail to answer e-mails, study finds…Fewer than half of the top global brands bother to answer e-mail correspondence sent to their Web sites, according to a study by Common Sense Advisory, a research company…”Our research showed that responding to prospects and customers appears to be a problem for most companies,” said Donald A. DePalma, the lead analyst for the report. Sixteen percent of those surveyed don’t offer e-mail or Web communication with current and prospective customers, the study found. Ok, the last paragraph is a little sad, since email and the web…