MarketingSherpa Blog

Is your house email list really, really safe? If this happened to AOL, it certainly can happen to you. From a press release sent at 4:42 today:

“Earlier this year, AOL began litigation against a major spammer, and in the process of which, discovered that an AOL employee had stolen member screennames in 2003, which AOL believes were used to send junk email. AOL has uncovered no information indicating that this theft involved member credit card or password information stored by AOL. AOL rapidly brought this information to the attention of federal law enforcement, and this morning the AOL employee was arrested and charged with criminal activity relating to the theft of these screenames.”

That’s one of the best-practices recommendations the Big Four — AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft and EarthLink — issued today in a report outlining their best ways to fight spam.

None of the recommendations breaks any new ground for legitimate, ethical bulk emailers, as you can see from this list:

* Do not harvest e-mail addresses through SMTP or other means (defined as collecting e-mail addresses, usually by automated means) without the owners’ affirmative consent.
* Register your e-mail domain with a creditable safelist provider.
* Always provide clear instructions to customers about how to unsubscribe or opt-out of receiving e-mail. Promptly respond to these requests.
* Do not use or send e-mail that contains invalid or forged headers.
* Do not use or send e-mail that contains invalid or nonexistent domain names in the From or Reply-To headers.
* Do not employ any technique to hide or obscure any information that identifies the true origin or the transmission path of bulk e-mail.
* Do not use a third party’s Internet domain name or allow mail to be relayed from or through a third party’s equipment without permission.
* Do not send e-mail that contains false or misleading information in the subject line or in its content.
* Monitor SMTP responses from recipients’ mail servers. Promptly remove all e-mail addresses for which the receiving mail server responds with a 55x SMTP error code (e.g., “user doesn’t exist”).

Each site has a copy of the report and the press release. For brevity, here’s the Yahoo! report. We’ll post the rest shortly.

One good way to promote paid online content is to give a bit of it away in a free ezine. Seybold Seminars, Publications and Consulting, which covers the print publishing industry, is now giving away one whole ezine — the weekly Seybold Bulletin: News and Views on Professional Publishing Tools for print and Web publishers — to promote its other offerings.

“Making the Seybold Bulletin available to the entire Seybold community will make this publication a forum for everyone involved in any publishing discipline,” Cynthia Wood, Seybold Publications editor, said in a press release.

MediaLive International, Seybold’s parent company, also said it has redesigned the 100K-sub ezine, its companion to the bimonthly Seybold Report, and subscribed its paid users to that publication instead.

Check out the newly free ezine here.

We are so ready to have Google launch Gmail, if only so it will stop all the Kremlin-watching from the news media (us excluded, of course).

MarketingSherpa was the first big trade pub to scrutinize Gmail’s ad impact and analyze its potential impact on you and your email campaigns. (AND give you screenshots (with Google’s permission) so you could see for yourself what the interface, copy and ads look like.)

Now everybody’s getting into the act, especially the New York Times with its latest investigation (register first) analyzing which emails get which ads and which ones don’t. This article does go deep down into which ads show up where but doesn’t shed all that much new light.

I just had to share this quote from today’s issue of InfoCommerce Report, with which I absolutely, completely agree:

“Over our past decade of consulting to the directory industry, we’ve determined there are a few red flag phrases that invariably mark a bad idea for a new directory product. The first phrase, used to describe the inspiration for the concept is, “because there’s nothing else like it.” If this phrase is followed by “everyone will use it” as a description of the target market, you know you’ve got an absolute, guaranteed failure in the making.

Absence of an established directory in the proposed market should be a signal for concern, not jubilation.”

Thanks entirely to your ceaseless nudging emails (you all know who you are), I asked our Web Tech Christian Vanek to switch priorities this week to bring you an RSS-feed.

If you don’t know what an RSS-feed is, please keep reading…. However if you’re one of the RSS-cognoscenti, and you’d like to add our feed to your reader, here’s the XML URL you should cut and paste:

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/rss/msherpa_rss.rss

For RSS-newbies: if you click on the link above, all you’ll see is a blank screen. To make it work, you need to install a reader on your computer. It’s quick, it’s easy, and many readers are entirely complimentary.

There are close to 100 readers out there (which I find a little confusing.) Three of my favorites are at:
http://www.pluck.com
http://www.newsgator.com
http://reader.rocketinfo.com/desktop/

When you have a reader, it means every time you see a little “XML” or “RSS” or “Syndic8” icon on a blog or news site you like, you can click on it and thereafter have that site’s hotlinked headlines sent automatically to a special reader in-box on your computer. Plus, there’s no junk email (yet anyway.)

You can also use handy tools to add RSS feeds to appear on your own Web site or intranet. So, you could add our headlines to your site very easily. One place that helps with that is http://www.feedroll.com

If you’d like more info about RSS in general and/or to see some screenshots what readers look like, you can check out the handy article our MarketingSherpa Editor wrote earlier this year:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2606
(Open access)

Thanks for your support (and your nudges.)

Nothing tells Gmail users they’ve got email in their spam folders. Okay, this isn’t news — we reported in the June 3 MarketingSherpa (link below) — but nobody else seems to be as bothered about it as we are, so we’re going to repeat it here:

If you get an email that (rightly or wrongly) Gmail’s filters determine is spam, it goes to a spam folder. Unlike most other Web email systems, though, the interface doesn’t indicate you have messages in the spam folder or how many, the way Yahoo! (its main competitor so far) does.

Yahoo! recently took away the last incentives that would force a user to at least go into and clear the spam folder when it decided not to count spam email against the user’s total storage capacity and then boosted free users to 100MB. And, it clears out any spam and trash the user hasn’t already dumped, so email that gets routed to the spam folder will likely die unnoticed, and you won’t even get a bounce notice (until the user abandons the mailbox).