Why Email Stamps Are a Bad Idea

(also posted on the Return Path blog)

Rich Gingras, CEO of Goodmail is an incredibly smart and stand-up professional.  I’ve always liked him personally and had a tremendous amount of respect for him.  However, the introduction of the email stamp model by Goodmail is a radical departure from the current email ecosystem, and while I’m all for change and believe the spam problem is still real, I don’t think stamps are the answer.  Rich has laid out some of his arguments here in the DMNews blog, so I’ll respond to those arguments as well as add some others in this posting.  I will also comment on the DMNews blog site itself, but this posting will be more comprehensive and will include everything that’s in the other posting.

It seems that Goodmail’s main argument in favor of stamps is that whitelists don’t work.  While he clearly does understand ISPs (he used to work at one), he doesn’t seem to understand the world of publishers and marketers.  His solution is fundamentally hostile to the way they do business.  I’m happy to have a constructive debate with him about the relative merits of different approaches to solving the false positive problem for mailers and then let the market be the ultimate judge, as it should be.

First, whitelists are in fact working.  I know — Return Path runs one called Bonded Sender.  We have documented several places that Bonded Senders have a 21% lift on their inbox delivery rates over non-Bonded Senders.  It’s hard to see how that translates into “bad for senders” as Rich asserts.  When the average inbox deliverability rate is in the 70s, and a whitelist — or, by the way, organic improvements to reputation — can move the needle up to the 90s, isn’t that good?

Second, why, as Goodmail asserts, should marketers pay ISPs for spam-fighting costs?  Consumers pay for the email boxes with dollars (at AOL) or with ads (at Google/Yahoo/Hotmail).  Good marketers have permission to mail their customers.  Why should they have to pay the freight to keep the bad guys away?  And for that matter, why is the cost “necessary?”  What about those who can’t afford it?  We’ve always allowed non-profits and educational institutions to use Bonded Sender at no cost.  But beyond that, one thing that’s really problematic for mailers about the Goodmail stamp model is that different for-profit mailers have radically different costs and values per email they send.

For example, maybe a retailer generates an average of $0.10 per email based on sales and proit.  So the economics of a $0.003 Goodmail stamp would work.  However, they’re only paying $0.001 to deliver that email, and now Goodmail is asserting that they “only” need to pay $0.003 for the stamp.  But what about publishers who only generate a token amount per individual email to someone who receives a daily newsletter based on serving a single ad banner?  What’s their value per email?  Probably closer to $0.005 at most.  Stamps sound like they’re going to cost $0.003.  It’s hard to see how that model will work for content delivery — and content delivery is one of the best and highest uses of permission-based email.

Next, Rich’s assertion that IP-based whitelists are bad for ISPs and consumers because IP-based solutions have inherent technology flaws that allow senders to behave badly doesn’t make sense.  A cryptographically based solution is certainly more sophisticated technology — I’ve never doubted that.

In terms of the practical application, though, I’m not sure there’s a huge difference.  Either type of system (IP or crypto) can be breached, either one is trackable, and either one can shut a mailer out of the system immediately — the only difference is that one form of breach would be trackable at the individual email level and the other would only be trackable in terms of the pipeline or IP.  I’m not sure either one is more likely to be breached than the other — a malicious or errant spammy email can either be digitally signed or not, and an IP address can’t be hijacked or spoofed much like a digital signature can’t be spoofed.

It’s a little bit like saying your house in the suburbs is more secure with a moat and barbed wire fence around it than with locks on the doors and an alarm system.  It’s an accurate statement, but who cares?

I’m not saying that Return Path will never consider cryptographic-based solutions.  We absolutely will consider them, and there are some things around Domain Keys (DKIM) that are particularly appealing as a broad-based standard.  But the notion that ONLY a cryptographic solution works is silly, and the development of a proprietary technology for authentication and crypotgraphy when the rest of the world is trying desparately to standardize around open source solutions like DKIM is an understandable business strategy, but disappointing to everyone else who is trying to cooperate on standards for the good of the industry.  I won’t even get into the costs and time and difficulty that mailers and ISPs alike will have to incur to implement the Goodmail stamp system, which are real.  Now mailers are being told they need to implement Sender ID or SPF as an IP-based authentication protocol — and DKIM as a crypto-based protocol — and also Goodmail as a different, competing crypto-based protocol.  Oy vey!

Email stamps also do feel like they put the world on a slippery slope towards paid spam — towards saying that money matters more than reputation.  I’m very pleased to hear Goodmail clarify in the last couple of days that they are now considering implementing reputation standards around who qualifies for certified mail as well, since that wasn’t their original model.  That bodes well for their program and certainly removes the appearance of being a paid spam model.  However, I have heard some of the proposed standards that Goodmail is planning on using in industry groups, and the standards seem to be much looser than AOL’s current standards, which, if true, is incredibly disappointing to say the least.

Jupiter analyst David Daniels also makes a good point, which is that stamps do cost money, and money on the line will force mailers to be more cautious about “overmailing” their consumers.  But that brings me to my final point about organic deliverability.  The mailers who have the best reputations get delivered through most filtering systems.  Reputations are based largely on consumer complaints and unknown user rates.  So the mailers who do the best job of keeping their lists clean (not overmailing) and only sending out relevant, requested mail (not overmailing) are the ones that will naturally rise to the top in the world of organic deliverability.  The stamp model can claim one more forcing function here, but it’s only an incremental step beyond the forcing function of “fear of being filtered” and not worth the difficulty of adopting it, or the costs, or the risks associated with it.

Rich, I hope to continue to dialog with you, and as noted in my prior posting, I think separating the issues here is healthy.

AOL and Goodmail: Two steps back for email, Part II

(also posted on the Return Path blog)

There’s been a lot of noise this week since the news broke about AOL and Goodmail, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to change the direction of the dialog a little bit.

First, there are two main issues here, and I think it’s healthy to separate them and address them separately. One issue is the merits of an email stamp system like the one Goodmail is proposing, relative to other methods of improving and ensuring email deliverability.  The second issue — and the one that got me started earlier this week – is the question of AOL making usage of Goodmail stamps a mandatory event, replacing its enhanced whitelist.  To really separate the issues, this posting will tackle the second question, and the next posting will tackle the first question.

I have reached out to Charles Stiles this morning to try to clarify AOL’s position on Goodmail.  Initially, it was reported in the press that AOL was discontinuing their enhanced whitelist on June 30, and that Goodmail stamps were the only option available to mailers who wanted guaranteed delivery, images, and links in their emails via the enhanced whitelist.  But Charles has subsequently made some unofficial comments that the AOL enhanced whitelist will live on as an organically-driven or reputation-earned entity, and that Goodmail stamps will just be one option of many to gain enhanced whitelist status.  This is a critical distinction, and one that AOL needs to make.

If in fact they are not shutting down their enhanced whitelist on June 30 as reported and forcing thousands of mailers to use Goodmail as opposed to organically earning their way onto the enhanced whitelist, then I will help them publicize the correction since I’ve been such a vocal critic.  That would be great for the industry, and it’s my biggest hope that something good will come out of this controversy.

If AOL is making Goodmail the king — the only way to reliably reach users inboxes — then my complaints stand:  the lack of affordability for many mailers is problematic; the threat of a monopoly is real; and the absence of an organic route for mailers who have clear end-user permission to send email and sterling reputations runs counter to the entire spirit of the Internet.  AOL can accept Bonded Sender or not, although I hope they do some day.  But to tell mailers they have no other option, and in particular no organic option, to use the AOL enhanced whitelist to properly reach customers who are requesting their email is akin to Google telling the world that they will only present paid search results in the future, and that organic search is dead.

Can you imagine how well that would go over?

What’s in store?

Whether you’re a tech enthusiast, a math geek, or a student of humanity, Union Square Ventures’ Brad Burnham has a great post this week on the USV blog about data storage and how much we as a human race can consume.

It’s quick, worth a read, and it uses math terms that I’m pretty sure even my wife, dad, and Board members who went to MIT don’t know off the top of their heads (of course, having said that, I’m sure one of them will shortly email me to prove me wrong with their command of 10-to-the-21st power).

Brad’s conclusion is great…once the battle shifts away from storage, where will it go next?

AOL and Goodmail: Two steps back for email

(posted on the Return Path blog a couple days ago here)

Remember the old email hoax about Hillary Clinton pushing for email taxation? When we first heard AOL’s plans for Goodmail today, we thought maybe the hoax had re-surfaced and a few industry reporters got hooked by it. But alas, this tax plan seems to be true.

AOL has long held the leading standard in email whitelisting. Every email sender who cares about delivery has tried to keep their email reputation high so that they could earn placement on AOL’s coveted Enhanced Whitelist. Now, AOL may be saying that those standards don’t matter as much as a postage stamp when it comes to email delivery.

AOL will begin phasing out its enhanced whitelist in favor of Goodmail’s brand new and untested certification program — which requires a fee for each email sent. This effectively encourages marketers and senders to focus not as much on email best practices but on paying cash for inbox reach. It punishes companies who already do everything right with email by adding another roadblock before they can reach customers.

With senders having to pay a fraction of a cent for each email sent, the fees for companies (and profits for AOL and Goodmail) will mount and good mailers will not always be able to participate — even if they have a pristine email reputation and customer relationship. This is in effect taxation of the good guys with cash – and it does nothing to help the good guys who can’t afford the cost or to deter the bad guys who just plan to spam anyway.

Email getting delivered to the mailbox should be based on the reputation of the sender — not whether they paid for guaranteed delivery. Now AOL is saying that isn’t enough. By charging significant dollars for email delivery, AOL and Goodmail are on the road to creating a “pay to play” model that puts subscriber benefit and sender equality second.

Goodmail reportedly uses some reputation data to determine “good” senders. What data do they use? Is it comprehensive? It is our strong opinion that email delivery should be based on a solid email reputation. That reputation should be based on a comprehensive set of data points including in-depth complaint rates, unknown user rates, spam trap data, permission practices, email infrastructure, volume of email sent and identity integrity, among a long list of other factors.
If Goodmail looks at less data than AOL currently uses … so how can it be better?

AOL stands to make a lot of money at the risk of setting back email as best practices-based marketing. This is bad for senders who care about setting high email standards, bad for consumers’ inboxes and simply, bad policy.

There’s been a ton of coverage of this problem, including this great one today in DMNews.  Look for a lot more reaction from the industry to this once people really understand what’s going on.

Spam is Dead.  Long Live Spam!

As pointed out in The Register yesterday (and picked up by Whit in his feed), it’s now been exactly two years since Bill Gates declared that Microsoft would eliminate spam in two years.

Hmmm.  Let’s think about that.  Filters do keep getting better, which Gates predicted.  But challenge/response filtering seems to be dead in the water, and the notion that we’re all going to pay for email stamps seems to be toast as well.

So where are we?  Spam is certainly more of a nuisance than a true crisis these days, which is even more true than when I wrote about here 15 months ago.  But it still consumes massive amounts of time, bandwidth, computing power, and mental energy to deal with the problem and reduce its visible impact on end users.  And even then, the problems of too much spam and too many false positives (emails which aren’t spam that get filtered by mistake) are still very real.  Bottom line — it’s still a business problem with a real, growing market and sub-markets and after-markets for solutions.

With apologies to my many friends and business partners at Microsoft, maybe as is the case with the occasional piece of software, Gates needs to release version 3.0 of his comment before it sticks.

Buying Back Your Own Left Leg

There has been much written about the spectacular sale of Pixar to Disney for $7.4 billion this week.  The fact that Steve Jobs is now Disney’s largest individual shareholder is amazing news on many levels.  Fred has a great posting on this today from the investor perspective.

Another angle that I find interesting about this transaction is that it reminds me to some extent of Yahoo’s purchase of Overture a couple years back.  Yahoo OWNED the search business.  For years.  Invented it.  Synonymous with it.  Then they let others lap them they became more of a diversified online media company, and voila!  Others focused, innovated, and created a massive business in paid search.  Yahoo lost its own leg and had to pay $1 billion or so to buy it back.

The same could be said of Disney.  There was no other animated film company in America of note for DECADES.  Disney was it.  The mouse ruled the house.  Then others innovated, figured out how to sprinkle their own version of pixie dust on things, while Disney became a global multi-dimensional media and entertainment conglomerate, and poof!  $7.4 billion later, they had to buy their own franchise back to reclaim the animation throne.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but these stories tell me that diversification may be a wonderful thing, but businesses should never forget to innovate at their core and think like insurgents, not like unassailable market leaders.

Book Short:  Required Reading

The Leadership Pipeline, by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel, should be required reading for any manager at any level in any organization, although it’s most critical for CEOs, heads of HR, and first-time managers.  Just ask my Leaderhip Team at Return Path, all of whom just had to read the book and join in a discussion of it!

The book is easy to read, and it’s a great hands-on playbook for dealing with what the authors call the six leadersihp passages:

From Individual Contributor to Manager (shift from doing work to getting work done through others)

From Manager to Manager of Managers (shift to pure management, think beyond the function)

From Manager of Managers to Functional Manager (manage outside your own experience)

From Functional Manager to Business Manager (integrate functions, shift to profit and longer term views)

From Business Manager to Group Manager (holistic leadership, portfolio strategies, value success of others)

From Group Manager to Enterprise Manager (outward looking, handle external and multiple constituencies, balance strategic and visionary long-term thinking with the need to deliver short-term operating results)

All too often, especially in rapidly growing companies, we promote people and move them around without giving enough attention to the critical success factors involved in each new level of management.  I’ve certainly been guilty of that at Return Path over the years as well.  It’s just too easy to get trapped in the velocity of a startup someitmes to forget these steps and how different each one is.  This book lays out the steps very neatly.

It’s also one of the few business books that at least makes an attempt — and a good one at that — at adapting its model to small companies.  In this case, the authors note that the top three rungs of the pipeline are often combined in the role of CEO, and that Manager of Managers is often combined with Functional Managers.

Anyway, run, don’t walk, to buy this one!

Book short:  Proto Gladwell

I’m sure author Robert Cialdini would blanch if he read this comparison, but then again, I can’t be the first person to make it, either.  His book, Influence:  The Psychology of Persuasion, is an outstanding read for any marketing or sales professional, but boy does it remind me of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Blink (book; blog post).  Of course, Cialdini’s book came out a decade before Gladwell’s!  Anyway, Influence is a great social science look at the psychology that makes sales and marketing work.

Cialdini talks about sales and marketing professionals as “compliance practitioners,” which is a great way to think about them, quite frankly.  He boils down the things that make sales and marketing work to six core factors: consistency, reciprocation, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity.

Reciprocation – we hate being in a state of being beholden so much that we might even be willing to do a larger favor than the one done for us in order to remove the state.  Think about “free gifts” in merchandising as an example of this, or being in a negotiation where someone trying to make a cold sale on you offers a fallback, smaller sale.  For example, you don’t want to buy anything from the boy scout, but after you say no to the $5 raffle ticket and he asks about the $1 candy bar, you feel more obligated to buy the $1 candy bar because the boy scout has “given” on his initial request.

Consistency – once we have made a choice, personal and interpersonal pressures force us to back it up and justify our earlier decision – even more so when in writing or when declared to others.  This is why marketers love getting testimonials from customers; the testimonial locks the customer in emotionally, as well as encouraging others to buy the product.

Social proof – if others think it’s correct, it must be correct, especially if those other people are like us.  There are some scary examples in the book here, such as Reverand Jim Jones and The People’s Temple mass suicides.  Gripping, but creepy.

Liking – we listen to people we like, and we like people to whom we’re similar or who are physically attractive.  This section was especially reminiscent of Blink, but with different and more marketer-focused examples.

Authority – we have an extreme willingness to listen to authority, even when the authority isn’t quite relevant.  This is why celebrity endorsements work so well.

Scarcity – we have a extreme motivation of fear of loss, either or something, or of the opportunity to have something.  Who doesn’t like to keep doors open as long as possible?

The one place the book falls down a little bit is in the sections at the end of each chapter talking about how to resist that particular technique through jujitsu – the art of “turning the enemy’s strength to your advantage.”  While nice in theory, Cialdini’s examples aren’t super helpful beyond saying “when you think you’re getting suckered, stop — and then say no.”

Overally, though, the book is well written and choc full of examples.  Thanks to marketer Mallory Kates for sending me this great book!

New Media Deal, Part II – the We Media Deal

My original New Medial Deal posting from August, 2004, is my favorite posting of all 220 or so that I’ve done to date. It has the most clicks of any posting I’ve done. People mention it to me all the time. I even used it as the foundation for the preface to our book at Return Path, Sign Me Up!

The general thesis (although the original posting is short and worth reading) is simple. Old Media was one-way communication – they produce it, you consume it, and Old Media had a deal with us: they give us free or cheap content, we tolerate their advertising. Think about your favorite radio station or an episode of The Office on TV. The New Media deal is an Internet derivative of that, that is founded on some degree of two-way communication: they give us free services and more targeted advertising in exchange for some of our personal data — just like the Old Media deal, we are willing make a small sacrifice, in this case, some pieces of our anonymity, in a heartbeat if the value exchange is there. This is true of everything from personalized stock quotes on My Yahoo! to the New York Times on the Web. The New Media Deal doesn’t replace the Old Media Deal, it just adapts it to the new environment.

But what about the new generation of services that have popped up on the web around peer production?  The ones that aren’t one-way communication or two-way communication, but community-oriented communciation.  (Note I am resisting hard calling them Web 2.0, but you know it’s there somewhere.)  Does the New Media Deal still apply, or are we on to something else?  I think the rules are morphing once again, and now there’s a new deal — let’s call it the We Media Deal — that builds on the “data as part of the value exchange” moniker of the New Media Deal. Like its predecessor deals, the We Media Deal doesn’t replace the New Media Deal or the Old Media Deal, it just adapts it for new types of services.

The We Media Deal has two components to it:  (1) the value of the service to you increases in lock-step as you contribute more data to it, and (2) the more transparent the value exchange, the more willing you are to share your data.

Ok – that sounds very academic – what do I mean in plain English? Let’s break it down.

1. The value to you increases in lock-step as you contribute more data.  This is something that probably wasn’t obvious with the original New Media Deal, since it wasn’t clear that if you gave My Yahoo! incrementally more data (one more stock quote, for example), you’d get more relevant ads or services.  It’s a pretty static value exchange.  But think about the new generation of web services around peer production.

– The more you use Delicious to bookmark web pages, the more relevant it becomes to you, and the more dependent you become on it as your own “Internet within an Internet.”

– The more you wite a blog or post photos to Flickr, the more engrained the act of blogging becomes in your daily existence — you start looking at the world, ever so slightly, through the lens of “that would make an interesting posting” (trust me).

– The more you use Wikipedia (or wikis in general), the more committed you become to Wikipedia as your first go-to source for information, and the more you get infected with the desire to contribute to it.

The bottom line with the first part of the We Media Deal is that the more you give to the system, the more you want and need out of the system.  A big part of peer production is that most people fundamentally, if quietly, want to belong to any bit of community they can find.  All these new web services of late have transformed the mass Internet from a read platform to a read/write platform, so now everyone can have a say in things.  The same reason eBay is cooler and bigger than the New York Times on the Web will drive this new generation of services, and new spins on old services, forward.

2. Next up — the more transparent the value exchange, the more willing you are to share your data.  Transparecy rules.  When you contribute to the web, you’re exposed, so why is trasparency a help and not a hindrance?  Let’s look at the same 3 examples.

– Delicious let’s you delete your account and all your personal data.  They’re blatant about it during the sign-up process.  The result?  It increases your trust in the network since you can easily exit at any time.

– Blogging and Flickr couldn’t be more transparent.  They’re personal printing presses.  If you’re good at it, you really have to think before you write. It’s you – you’re really hanging out there transparent for all the world to see – therefore you’re even more invested in what you write and derive even more value from the activity.

– Similarly, Wikipedia tracks who changes what, and if you make an error, the community will correct it in an astonishingly short time frame, keeping you honest.

The good news is that, while the We Media Deal is coming of age, our New Media Deal is alive and well and growing stronger as the web evolves as well.  Free services and more targeted advertising in exchange for some of your personal data makes a ton of sense when the right balance of service and data is there.  Transparency and control make the We Media Deal an even stronger stronger bond between company and individual, mostly because the bond is between company and community — the deal gets more solid the more we as individuals invest in it.

Book Short:  Fables and Morals

Courtesy of my colleague Stephanie Miller, I had a quick holiday read of Aesop & The CEO: Powerful Business Lessons from Aesop and America’s Best Leaders, by David Noonan, which I enjoyed.  The book was similar in some ways to Squirrel, Inc., which I recently posted about, in that it makes its points by allegory and example (and not that it’s relevant, but that it relies on animals to make its points).

Noonan takes a couple dozen of Aesop’s ancient Greek fables and groups them in to categories like Rewards & Incentives, Management & Leadership, Strategy, HR, Marketing, and Negotiations & Alliances – and for each one, he gives modern-day management examples of the lessons.

For example, in the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, the lesson clearly is to strike while the iron is hot, or that a good plan executed today is better than a perfect one that’s too late.  Noonan gives the example of Patton’s capture of Messina, Sicily during World War II.

And in The Hare & The Tortoise, where of course the moral is that slow & steady wins the race, Noonan gives the example of how New York Knicks coach Rick Pitino inspired Mark Jackson, who was chosen 18th in the NBA draft, to win the rookie of the year award in 1987 by helping him gain confidence by building on his strengths.

All in, a good read, even with that painful reminder that the Knicks used to have a decent basketball team.

New Media Deal – a comment

A user calling him or herself “graciouswings” (who left a bogus email address with his/her comment, so I couldn’t email him/her) made a lengthy comment to my New Media Deal posting (posting here, comment at the bottom or here).

The meat of the comment was:

“advertising doesn’t bug us if it’s not too intrusive and if there’s something in it for us as consumers.” This is simply not true. This notion is based on unfair playing grounds. People don’t like seeing commercials before movies. People _are_ bugged by having to create an account at every website they visit, whether it’s to post a comment, purchase a song, ask a question of tech support, read the news, or get their local weather info — agreeing to the privacy statement by the by. People don’t read the privacy statements. People aren’t given a choice, other than to simply not use the service. People have no choice but to watch those ads in the theater — in spite of having paid a day’s salary for their family to watch the movie — because, if they didn’t, they’d have to be late and get bad seats in the theater. And if you think that not using services or receiving diminished services is a choice, you’re lying to yourself. It’s discrimination.

I’m struggling to come up with a definition of discrimination that fits graciouswings’ argument, since discrimination means “treatment based on class or category rather than individual merit; or partiality or prejudice.”  All consumers are treated equally with respect to advertising, as far as I can tell.

And although it’s only one data point, I do have an interesting anedcote that gets of the core of this argument.  When I was running marketing for MovieFone (777-FILM) back in the 1990s, we ran a survey of our own customers and asked them which they would prefer:  continuing to use the MovieFone service with its 20-second uninterruptible movie advertisement at the beginning of every call; or have MovieFone become an ad-free service on a 900-number at a cost of $0.25 per call to the caller.  The results were *overwhelming* that consumers would rather listen to the ad than pay a quarter for the convenience of the service.  And this isn’t an ad that consumers could skip or flip past like a print ad.  I suspect if we ran a poll asking people if they’d rather pay $3.00 for a copy of the New York Times or pay $1.00 and have a bunch of ads in it, they’d respond the same way.

But maybe consumers are different when it comes to the New Media Deal.  Maybe they would rather pay for services than get them for free in exchange for some of their personal data.  I suspect if that was the case, some entrepreneur (perhaps graciouswings) would make a fortune developing paid, ad-free versions of most major web services that would attract some meaningful portion of consumers under a different model.  But seems to me that the body of empirical evidence is proving otherwise.