Wow! This is a very very interesting web page that everyone should read to understand how spammers avoid the walls we put up to protect ourselves.

I always wondered the purpose of the blank emails that come into my mail box. No subject heading, no from address, no content - whats the point silly spammers?? Well after you read the tricks on the web page you will know it is a very smart way of testing if an email address is valid.

Spammers are skilled at their job - do I respect them? Well I respect their skill and knowledge but thats it. They have forced all of us in the commerical email space to look at our ethics and practices and thats a good thing.

Spammers take advantage of people who are naive in the ways of the Internet and thus end up giving their hard earned dollars to scams. I don’t respect that and I consider it criminal. At the end of the day we need to educate the Internet users not to buy anything off spammers because unless people stop buying off them there will always be spammers.

Click here to read the article about spammers tricks.

The New Zealand Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill draws closer to becoming law within New Zealand and all businesses who send email to their customers should now be looking at their current email practices.

Why Should You Be Concerned About the Anti-Spam Law?
Now you might not care or believe that the new anti-spam law will affect your business but how would you deal with a person who uses the internet to launch a full scale war against you and your business by posting everywhere they can that you are a spammer and your business earns a profit by spamming people? Your brand suffers and you start losing business and the only thing you did was send the person an email after their email address was entered into your website requesting more information from your business. Does this sound absurd? No, it happens frequently and if you want a real life example of a reputable company who faced this issue click on the article link in the resources section below.

What Action Do You Need To Take Now?
I suggest you commence reviewing your current email marketing processes and to ensure you are complaint because there are people out there that will use the anti-spam law to justify their actions for attempting to destroy your brand and reputation.

This article is about helping you start cleaning up your email marketing processes in readiness for the new law - don’t forget the law is not only about protecting the rights of the email recipient but also the email sender - that’s you.

I forecast the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill will become law in 2007 probably near or in the last quarter of 2007 so it is time start thinking about compliance today!

The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill Explained
My interpretation of the bill suggests that when it becomes law Businesses and Individuals alike will have six months to get their email processes and systems compliant. That is not a lot time to turn processes around in my humble opinion. I predict it will take most businesses a minimum of three months to clean up their current mailing lists and seek consent from existing customers then upgrading or implementing systems to help with compliance such as keeping records of subscribers consenting to receive email and processing unsubscribe requests may stretch that timeframe out further.

The Bill if passed in its current form will prohibit the sending of “commercial electronic messages” unless the recipient has consented to receive the messages BEFORE a message is sent.

The term “commercial electronic message” includes an electronic message (an email, text, instant message, but not a voice call or facsimile) that markets or promotes goods, services, land, or business opportunities. The law will apply to messages with links to another message or website that is commercial.

The sender must be able to prove that consent has been given by the recipient. The consent can either be:

• “express” - this form of consent can be given by the person responsible for the electronic address (or by any person who uses that address);
• “inferred” - from the conduct, business and other relationships of the persons concerned.
  The Bill is not specific as to when the consent can be reasonably “inferred” and when it cannot. However, regulations may be introduced which provide further guidance on where to draw the line; and
• “deemed” - this applies where a person’s electronic address is published in an official or business capacity. For example, an email address on a business website will be “deemed” consent so long as the message sent is relevant to the business or role of the person responsible for that address. However, there will be no deemed consent if the website expressly states that the person responsible for the address does not wish to receive unsolicited electronic messages.

Where to Start?
To help you on your way here is an important task we give our customers who engage us to improve their email marketing processes.

Who or what is currently sending commercial emails in your business?

If I asked you if you knew exactly how many emails your customers and prospects receive from your business per month would you know? Each department of your business may be sending emails to your customers and this email communication needs to be assessed for compliance.

The task here is to identify every type of email you send to your clients as a Business and review the content. Look for:

A) Any promotional content within the message that gets sent to your clients. If you find that type of content then you may need to get permission from your client unless of course you have done so already (I hear a Tui Ad!).

B) Does the email contain contact details for your business and who authorised the sending of that message? If not you will need to add this information as the law will require that the message clearly identifies the person who authorises sending the message. Even if the message is not promotional in its content this is still good practice to inform the recipient.

C) If the email is sent to a mailing list say your monthly newsletter then does it provide an unsubscribe link or information on how to unsubscribe within the content. The bill is very vague on this requirement. All it seems to state is:

“unless the sender and the receiver agree otherwise, all messages must contain a functional unsubscribe facility that allows the recipient (at no cost) to inform the sender that no unsolicited electronic messages should be sent.”

To be safe I would add an unsubscribe link or unsubscribe statement within all these types of messages.

D) Is there any automated systems within your business that send out emails? For example does your merchant system send out an automated receipt upon online payment? Does that system send out emails to clients or prospects?

We had one client who told us that they found by accident an outdated promotion of a product (that they did not sell anymore) within a “receipt of transaction” email that was sent to the purchaser. The way they found out was a person rang them and wanted to take advantage of the “special deal” in the email!

Once you have identified all the commercial emails sent via your business review the content and check if any mention of promoting goods and/or services is present. If so decide if it should be within the content or not. If you do believe the promotional content is required you may need to seek consent from the recipient.

Summary
By starting to identify who you are sending information to and which department of your business is sending commercial email you are well on the way to identifying where compliance needs to happen.

There are many more tasks that you will need to do for compliance, however taking this action is a good starting point.

Resources
Court sides with alleged ‘vacation’ spammer
http://news.com.com/2100-1030_3-6138874.html

Anti Spam Compliance Solutions For You & Your Business

To see how we can help you and your business comply with the NZ Anti-SPAM Act click here

Found this interesting book on the net. I will order it as it looks very interesting. Here is the books description on Oreilly

“The mounting onslaught of email pitches for porn, pills, and penis enlargement has some techno-pundits declaring that spam is on the verge of destroying the Internet. In Spam Kings, author and veteran investigative journalist Brian S. McWilliams delivers a compelling account of the cat-and-mouse game played by spam entrepreneurs (including the notorious Davis Wolfgang Hawke, “Dr. Fatburn,” and Scott Richter) in search of easy fortunes and the cyber-vigilantes who are trying to stop them. ”

Click here for more info on Oreilly

It seems that ISP’s in the continuing war against SPAM are now using excessive bounce rates to identify spammers which has a negative impact on ethical email marketers.

Excessive bounce rates are normally a sign of spammers with their unlimited capacity to generate email addresses which most are invalid thus generating large bounce rates.

Because spammers are getting more and more creative and dare I say in more and more successful in fooling the current spam filters ISP’s are now adopting a zero tolerance policy with mail servers that generate reasonable amounts of bounces.

Now you can argue that the ethical email marketers with their confirmed opt-in mailing lists would not generate too many bounces but wait what about mailing lists that are contacted infrequently or only once every quarter or even once a year?

Because of the length between email communications and the fact that up to 30% of email addresses within a mailing list become invalid after 1 year you are sure to get a large amount of bounces.

There seems to be no way around this change in ISP policy where in some cases you only need to generate a reasonable bounce rate after one email campaign to be banned indefinitely.

The only way I can see currently is to increase your email campaign rate to reduce the bounce rate if you have long periods between email campaigns (who knows what some ISP’s would measure as long but I am guessing anymore than a month between email campaigns and you are asking for trouble) but then you start upsetting the subscribers as increased frequency of commercial based emails is normally not a good thing.

I would keep you posted on developments.

Yesh! Another news item on the increasing influx of spam in mail boxes. 

This is of course a huge concern to email marketers trying to do good by following every email standard and protocol on the planet. The cost of safelist accreditation services and other third party reputation services for email marketers is massive to say the least.  I personally believe the only ones making any real money are the companies who charge outrageous sums of money to vouch for your credibility as an email marketer.

News below…

EVERY day, 1.5 million e-mails are sent to staff and students at Edinburgh University from the outside world - but only 125,000 of those prove to be genuine.

Read more…

Have you noticed an increase in the amount of image based spam you receiving? I bet you have run up your ISP and demanded that they fix the problem pronto.

Well it really is not that simple anymore. You see spammers are getting real smart these days and buying very advanced software from underground software manufacturers (yes they have their own software vendors!). The software creates the spam image containing the spam message and then for every email sent (we are talking possibly millions a day) each embedded image is slightly altered at the pixel level so the current spam filters cannot identify the spam. That’s smart!

This is of course not good for the ethical email marketers as the ISP’s have now beefed up their spam filters to a level that our technicians describe as “block any email containing an embedded image.”. I can see why they have taken this approach as its far cheaper to block every embedded image than to spend time and money trying to filter content.

The thing that always bugs me is that the spammers are earning money from their ventures so logically they will keep on doing it until no one clicks on their links. So what are we all doing about understanding why some people click on links within the spammers emails? Who are they? Why do they do it?

This will interest you all.

A very interesting study has been completed and the results are amazing!

The Epsilon Interactive report stated that 69% of email users know how to activate suppressed images, and 57% at least sometimes activate images in promotional messages from senders they buy from or have accounts with, or from senders to whom they’ve given their permission to send them email.

Whats interesting is that 30% don’t have an idea on how to activate images or don’t even know they exist.  This highlights the importance of creating email messages that degrade gracefully.

Check out Dave Shea’s article on how to degrade email content. Click here.

Many of you might already know the reason why spammers are now using images for their messages but just in case you don’t have a read of this article. 

Click here

“The United States and China remained atop the list of countries spewing spam for the third quarter, UK-based security vendor Sophos said Monday, and the former had the dubious honour of extending its lead in the battle for spam share.

According to Sophos, servers in the US sent 21.6 percent of the world’s spam during the August-September time frame. China, in second, accounted for 13.4 percent. France, South Korea, and Spain rounded out the top five. China’s share was nearly 7 percent off the previous quarter, while the US’s part declined by 1.6 percent.”

Source…
Almost makes you wonder how effective the can-spam really is…

Finally! 

The Aussie government gets one of the top 200 spammers! I hope they keep on hitting him until he disappears of the face of this planet.
 
Saturday October 28, 2006
 
PERTH - A Perth-based company has been fined A$5.5 million ($6.5 million) for sending millions of unsolicited emails, with a judge labelling the spam annoying, costly to combat and a threat to the internet.
 
It is the first time an Australian company has been fined under the federal
government’s spam laws, introduced in April 2004.
 
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) last year launched the Federal Court action against business seminar advertiser Clarity1 and director Wayne Robert Mansfield.
 
It is believed Clarity1 clogged inboxes with as many as 75 million emails between April 2004 and April 2006.
 
This year, the court found Clarity1, which also trades as Business Seminars Australia and Maverick Partnership, had contravened the Spam Act 2003.
 
Federal Court judge Robert Nicholson yesterday fined Clarity1 A$4.5 million and Mansfield A$1 million for those contraventions.
 
Justice Nicholson said it was impossible to calculate the amount of loss or
damage caused by the emails.
 
The company has also been banned from sending any unsolicited emails.
 
ACMA chairman Chris Chapman said the judgment provided a strong warning to Australian spammers.
 
- AAP

I have also included some links for further reading.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20658339-2702,00.html

http://www.theage.com.au/news/Business/WA-company-fined-55m-over-spam-emails/2006/10/27/1161749294677.html

http://www.spamhaus.org/news.lasso?article=161