Due to my employment in an email marketing company, I constantly hear complaints from clients that can’t create their emails in the way that they wish.  If they don’t follow best practice their emails could be deemed as spam by email service providers such as Hotmail and Microsoft Outlook and will never be delivered to the inbox.  To avoid this they have to keep their emails as simple as possible, some would say “boring”, in order to increase deliverability rates.  Therefore, I pose the question, “are ESP’s restricting our creativity?”

False-positive filtering (emails incorrectly identified as spam) remains high among leading email service providers. 82 percent of email marketers said getting email messages delivered is a challenge for their organizations, and nearly 50 percent said that filtering by ISPs and corporations is the biggest delivery-related challenge.

In order to enhance deliverability rates companies must ensure that their ratio of text is high comapred to html and images, if images are present they should be simple and kept to a minimum, flashing images are renowned for increasing your spam rate.  Colour has to be kept to a minimum, coloured text and backgrounds, especially red, should be steered clear of.  Detecting spam based on the content of the e-mail, either by detecting keywords such as “opt-out” or “remove” is also very popular.  Sending bulk emails, bold text and monetary symbols are also a key feature of spam.

Companies who are trying to promote themselves online, therefore cannot engage in any of the above leaving them with, some would argue, dull emails.  Recipients therefore, might not bother reading or engaging with the mail.  Should ESP’s review their methods for rating emails as spam in order for companies to produce more exciting emails? Or should their spam rating procedures remain the same as the recipient is protected from real spam, even though the emails they receive may not be as stimulating?

It is difficult to level criticism at a Company such as Spamhaus. One that appears to stand for all that is good in the fight against spam. As the owner of a highly reputable email marketing software company and a true believer in eradicating spam, you might imagine I would be their greatest supporter. I was until a recent incident involving an agency supported by ION, and Spamhaus. The methods employed by Spamhaus on this occasion, combined with extremely poor communication from them, makes me now consider them less like a good cop, more like an untouchable dictator.

Several years ago we installed an email marketing solution for a very reputable agency, providing email marketing services to their clients. They have contracts in place insisting that their customers only use opt-in lists. On one occasion one of their customers sent an email to what they claimed was their opt-in email list. Due to a number of complaints and emails appearing in spam traps, Spamhaus correctly diagnosed spam emanating from the Agency network. They then listed the service.

This is a common practice. Once listed, any email shot broadcasting from that server more or less becomes useless. On this occasion however Spamhaus decided not to list the offending server. Instead they took a more radical step, deciding to list the Agency’s entire IP range. This effectively closed all email traffic to and from the agency. The agency host emails for around 400 corporate email accounts and perform email marketing for around 200 customers.

Spamhaus was contacted through their web forms. Their web site doesn’t list a phone number or postal address or any contact information. In reply, they claimed that they needed to be contacted by the “network owner” to release the ban. The Agency is listed with RIPE as the owners of their IP address and they certainly own their network. It emerged that Spamhaus had meant to say “upstream provider”. This confusion caused an unnecessary extra delay of two days

The Agency were unable to make direct contact with Spamhaus to explain their standpoint and Spamhaus appeared unwilling to listen. This situation forced the Agency to draw up ridiculous contingency plans in order to keep their business afloat. They constantly emailed Spamhaus via their web forms only to be greeted with the same automated response.

It was when they told their upstream provider that they may have to dismantle their network, give up their IP addresses and start again elsewhere that the provider decided to contact Spamhaus. The provider could hardly believe the massive reach of Spamhaus and the plight of the Agency. How could a simple addition to the Spamhaus list effectively put an email Agency out of business for almost 72 hours?

24 hours after being contacted by the upstream provider, and after 3 days of being unable to conduct their primary business, Spamhaus lifted the ban and normal business resumed. By that time the agency had lost clients and reputation and felt cheated. At no time did the agency even threaten Spamhaus with legal action, just wanting their freedom to conduct business.

At no time did Spamhaus call, warning of their impending actions before listing the Agency. At no time did Spamhaus send a warning email to the agency or their upstream provider. At no time did Spamhaus send a fax. At no time did Spamhaus fill in any of the agency’s web forms to say that they were going to effectively put them out of business.

Spamhaus wield such power, but appear to answer to no-one. They strike without warning and correspond with an arrogance akin to a Dictator. What recourse has anyone who falls foul of their methods? Who “polices” this self appointed “policeman” of the cyber world?

Do they remain “untouchable”? They certainly appear to be “uncontactable” On their own front page they boast about how a recently lost $11 million court cases is irrelevant as they are not a US company and thus untouchable by the US courts. Some will see this as an arrogant boast. Is this home page news for such a company? Home page news? I ask you?

Elsewhere they use the same mantra as many tobacco companies. “We don’t force you to use our product, but if you want it, it’s there” Is this to cover for their lack of responsibility when misdealing with “offenders”

In a recent Slashdot article the Spamhaus founder and Director, Steve Linford is likened to an X-Man. I think the Company now believe their own hype, running their organisation without recourse, without cash as their latest filed accounts show, and with wild abandon, the worst that can happen to a limited company being that they can be shut down, with no one suffering any serious financial loss. No one in the company would be hurt in any financial sense.

With all Spamhaus’s X-Man heroics, has the spam in your inbox really decreased?

Perhaps the real solution lies in the introduction of Domain Keys.

More importantly let me say it again. Who “polices” the policeman?

The reputation of Real Estate Agents is not a good one. They get bad press and everyone has their horror story. But when you really stop and examine it, what value do they add in the sales process of a property? In fact do they actually even represent their clients’ best interests? I say they don’t, and with my recent experiences I simply don’t see why they can’t be replaced by a good bit of email marketing and a decent web site. Here is why…

I have recently had the arduous task to look for both commercial property to cope with the expansion of my email marketing company and also sell a private dwelling.  During my 6 month search for the ideal property for my company I quickly found that even though I was wanting to spend many hundreds of thousands of pounds, my company’s largest ever purchase, that I was never treated like a customer. The oddest thing about the property market in the North of Ireland is that the person paying the big money is not the customer, the seller of the property is as they pay the Estate Agent. And in a booming property market, the bad reputation of the property agent is well earned.

The largest commercial property agent in Northern Ireland is a local firm called BTW Shiells. As a first time investor I looked in the obvious places first.  Their web site does indeed have many commercial properties on it, but when it comes to site design and structure I was really surprised as to how little thought they gave to it.  As a potential purchaser of a property I had no way to search for properties that were still on the market and remove those that were marked as sold or let.  In fact you can’t even select to view properties for sale separate from those to let.  After sifting through 17 pages, that’s right, 17 pages of irrelevant properties I eventually found the property that seemed to be for sale and went to bookmark it for easy access in the future. Because of the site design I couldn’t bookmark. That meant the next time I went to find the property, I had to go looking all over again as the order changed when they added new premises to their site.

I then went to look for their email alert system, the next obvious way of being kept informed when a new property came on the market that matched my profile, an obvious function that would greatly enhance the service to potential investors, but again not available.

My second step was to email the company, no response after 2 days.

The third step was to pick up the phone and call, no response after 2 days.

My next call was a rant, the unfortunate receptionist gave me the cell phone number of the agent in charge of the property.

I managed to get a hold of the agent after several attempts, who in the first call told me that there was no point in me talking to him unless I offered the asking price of the property. This was all before I had even viewed it. This is someone that wanted me to spend hunderads of thousands of pounds. I thought to myself, “what would happen if I treated my customers in this way?”

After a quick view around and another abrupt discussion with the selling agent I did put a bid in, at the price he had insisted. 2 hours later he phoned me, the first unprompted call during my entire engagement, to tell me that the property that had languished on the market for 2 years had just gone up by £50,000; an obvious deal breaker.

This is only one commercial estate agent I have highlighted but my experiences across a range of commercial property agents is that their digital marketing is either non-existent or so out of date it is detrimental to their business. Looking objectively at the service that was actually offered in this example, the question has to be, what value did BTW Shiells offer that would have been easier to carry out on-line? Other than having someone to open the door to help view the property, I would have been much quicker and more comfortable using a web site that gave more transparency to the entire process than actually having to struggle to deal with an agent that had no obvious knowledge of the sellers intention and no real pull in managing his client.

As the agent is powerless as a go-between would it not be a lot more transparent, convenient and profitable to use email marketing and a web site for bidding on property that empowered the owner to control their ask price, their preferred bid and eventually their bid of choice? Other than giving access to the property, the agent adds no additional value. Sites like Propertynews.com are a great half way solution but I suggest it is time that property owners sell the property without the use of the agent. The time, money and frustration savings would be massive.

In my next blog entry hear how commercial property developers are paying estate agents to get them the best deal, meaning that the agent gets paid by the seller and the buyer, ensuring that the buyer gets a below market value deal and their customer (the seller) does not get the top price for their property. A move to digital marketing and a good web site could end this immoral behaviour.

BBC News are reporting that the Internet Engineering Task Force have approved the Domain Keys Identified Mail draft standard.

DKIM is a method of validating the identity of the sender of an e-mail via digital signatures placed into outgoing emails, which are then verified by the receiver.

Some pundits are predicting that this type of technology could be the saviour of email marketing, whilst others remain unconvinced that it is a “magic bullet” solution.

What positive and negative effects will DKIM have on your organisation? Of course the biggest question of all is… are you going to implement it?

TechEBlog have listed 5 future computing technologies.

These include Microsoft’s new Surface table-top computer, and the thinnest laptop currently available.

What new technologies/gadgets would you like to see helping marketers in 2007/2008?