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).]

I’m not sure as Fred says the crisis is over — but I think it’s on the way to being minimized. And Pamela’s right — filters like Cloudmark are pretty darn effective. Things like that just need to be rolled out to broader audiences. And Pamela’s also right that mailers will have to work on managing their identity and reputation in order to cope with new technologies like authentication and beyond. That’s a posting for another day.

But before we declare victory, let’s remember two things:

– First, these things take a LONG time to trickle down to a broad enough audience to say “problem solved.” I mean YEARS.

– Second, the bad guys aren’t going to give up without a fight. This is war! They’ll be back and they’ll find us. They’ll get better at avoiding filters, and they’ll infiltrate things like authentication and exploit loopholes in CAN-SPAM and other legislation. Remember, spam’s economics still work.

So I’m happy to say Spam isn’t still in Crisis Mode, but it’s not resolved either — how about Approaching Denoument?

Solving Problems Together

Last week, I started a series of new posts about our core values (a new tag in the tag cloud for this series) at Return Path.  Read the first one on Ownership here.

Another one of our core values is around problem solving, and ownership is intrinsically related.  We believe that all employees are responsible for owning solutions, not just surfacing problems.  The second core value I’ll write about in this series is written specifically as:

We solve problems together and always present problems with potential solutions or paths to solutions

In terms of how this value manifests itself in our daily existence, for one thing, I see people working across teams and departments regularly, at their own initiative, to solve problems here.  It happens in a very natural way.  Things don’t have to get escalated up and down management chains.  People at all levels seem to be very focused on solving problems, not just pointing them out, and they have good instincts for where, when, and how they can help on critical (and non-critical) items.

Another example, again relative to other workplaces I’ve either been at or seen, is that people complain a lot less here.  If they see something they don’t like, they do something about it, solve the problem themselves, or escalate quickly and professionally. The amount of finger pointing tends to be very low, and quite frankly, when fingers are pointed, they’re usually pointed inward to ask the question, “what could I have done differently?”

The danger of a highly collaborative culture like ours is teams getting stuck in consensus-seeking.  Beware!  The key is to balance collaboration on high value projects with authoritative leadership & direction.

A steady flow of problems are inherent in any business.  I’m thankful that my colleagues are generally quite strong at solving them!

The Business of Being a Scumbag

I’ve written a couple of times about what Fred calls the Internet’s Axis of Evil.  But David Kirkpatrick from Fortune just blew me away yesterday with his lurid description of the Internet’s crime scene.  This is a must-read for anyone who works in the online medium.

OnlyOnce, Part II

After more than six years, my blog starting looking like, well, a six-year old blog on an off-the-shelf template.  Thanks to my friends at Slice of Lime, OnlyOnce has a new design as of today as well as some new navigation and other features like a tag cloud and Twitter feed (and a new platform, WordPress rather than Typepad).  I know many people only read my posts via feed or email (those won’t change), but if you have a minute, feel free to take a look.  The site also has its own URL now – https://onlyonceblog.wpengine.com.

With my shiny new template, I may add some other features or areas of content over time, as well.  There are still a couple things that are only 95% baked, but I love the new look and wanted to make if “official” today.  Thanks to Kevin, Jeff, Mike, Lindsay, and everyone at Slice of Lime for their excellent design work, and for my colleague Andrea for helping do the heavy lifting of porting everything over to the new platform.

My dad, one of the smartest people I know, asked me a good question last week. “How’s the blog working out so far?”

My answer was generally “I’m not sure,” but as I thought about it more, I saw “good” coming from four different categories, in order of importance to me:

Thinking: One of the best things publishing a blog has done has been to force me to spend a few minutes here and there thinking about issues I encounter in a more structured way and crystallizing my point of view on them. Invaluable, but mostly for me.

Employees: A number of my employees read it, although I’m not exactly sure who since RSS is anonymous. I know this is helpful in that some of the folks in the company who I don’t speak with every day can hear more directly some of the things I’m thinking about instead of getting a filtered view from normal communication channels.

Technology: One of the main reasons I started the blog was to get more experience with blog/alert/publishing/RSS tools as I try to learn more about new technologies related to my company. This has paid off for me well so far (the technology has a long way to go!).

Business development: I have met two or three other companies who may be potential partners for Return Path through this. I also believe that the postings on industry-related topics have been helpful for both business development and PR purposes.

I promised my Dad I’d do a posting on this sometime soon…so happy Father’s Day, Pops! (I also got him a real present, don’t worry.)

Today, the FTC very shrewdly punted on the issue of the proposed “Do Not Email” list implementation, saying that authentication systems need to be put in place before such a list can be considered. This buys the world more time to work on more effective, market-driven solutions to the spam and false positive problems.

I read a few interesting posts on this today, including one from Jeff Nolan which nicely captured Chuck Schumer’s elegant combination of demagoguery and idiocy about this issue; and one from Anne Mitchell pointing out that they’re about six months late with their conclusion. Feels about right for the federal government.

What’s interesting to me is that all of the comments by and about the FTC and the proposed “Do Not Email” list focus on the wrong thing: they say that the problem with the list is that spammers would abuse it by hacking into it and stealing all the email addresses. Ok, I’ll admit, that’s one theoretical problem, but it’s not THE problem.

The structural problem with a national “Do Not Email” list is that responsible emailers, non-spammers, don’t need to use it since they get appropriate permission from their customers before sending them email…and spammers won’t bother using it since they don’t give a hoot anyway and will find a way around the list as they do everything else. In the end, the creation of such a list would do nothing to stop spam, but it would certainly create a lot of confusion for legitimate marketers and their customers around opting in and opting out. It would also, notably unlike the fairly successful national “Do Not Call” list, not do anything to reduce the volume of spam, which will create disappointment and anger among consumers (and hello, Senator Schumer, backfire on its political sponsors).

Those aren’t bigger problems than spam to be sure, but why should we implement a solution to the problem that doesn’t work at all and that causes its own ancillary problems along the way?

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.

• Soup for Nuts
  From our client, Business & Legal Reports, a HILARIOUS read in the strange-but-true category. This is essential reading for any manager who has ever mediated an employee dispute. Tthanks to Tami Forman for citing this one!
  (tags: Humor)

Rejected by the Body

My most recent posting ("Sometimes, There Is No Lesson To Be Learned") about a strange hiring incident at Return Path has so far generated 5 comments — a whopper for my blog.  You can read them here if you want.  They’re a little bit all over the map, but they did remind me of something I frequently tell senior people who I am interviewing to join the company:

Hiring a new senior person into an organization is like doing an organ transplant.  Sometimes, the body just rejects the organ, but at least you find out pretty quickly.

At least we found out relative quickly with this one, although it was more like the organ rejecting the body!

Six Candles:  You Can’t Tell What The Living Room Looks Like From the Front Porch

Today, Return Path is six years old.  I thought I’d celebrate the occasion by reflecting back on how different our business is now than we thought it would be at the beginning.

When we started Return Path, we were sure Email Change of Address (ECOA) was going to be a $100mm business.  It still may be someday, but it’s not now.  If you had told me when we started the company that we’d execute on ECOA but also be market leaders in email delivery assurance (which didn’t exist at the time), email list management and list rental (a huge market by the time we started), and email-based market research (which only barely existed at the time), I would have said "no way!"

But that’s where we are today, and we’re quite proud of it.  There aren’t more than a dozen people left in the company from the original, original team that set out to build a new type of product called Email Change of Address back in 1999/2000, although lots of our alumni are out there and remember the early days.

Running a startup is all about flexibility.  Unless you are that 1 in 100 entrepreneur whose original idea turns out to be exactly the wonderful, high-growth, high-margin business that you thought it was going to be on the back of that cocktail napkin, you need to be nimble and be able to shift as you spot new opportunities.  I’m happy that our team and culture thrive on that level of flexibility.

As one of my previous managers once said, you can’t tell what the living room looks like from the front porch.  You have to walk up to the front door, unlock it, and go inside and wander around before you get a real read on it, not to mention figure out if you want to have a seat.

Happy Birthday, Return Path!