| LED Digest 2298: Is Confirmed Opt-in Realistic? |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. November 30, 2006 Issue no. 2298 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Transactional Emails Being Ignored? ==-- ~ Adrian McElligott "Are BrightMail and the like doing a good job under the circumstances...?" ~ Renee Kennedy "In order to confirm email addresses, we're offering a download that is valuable..." ~ Steven Rothberg "...double opt-in is an extremely high standard and I believe one that is unrealistic..." --== The Email Crisis ==-- ~ Steve Pronger "As for email marketing, it may not be dead yet, but it's day has surely passed." ~ Joe Halbrook "...staying one-step ahead of [spammers] is sometimes daily challenge." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== An Auto-Refreshing Browser ==-- ~ James Miller ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Adrian McElligott Subject: Confirmation messages What percentage of the emails that you send end up in black holes and junk folders? What does this cost you in lost business? While all the major providers of spam filter technology claim fantastic accuracy, I would be interested to know what LEDs think. Are BrightMail and the like doing a good job under the circumstances, or should they be doing more to reduce their false positive rate? Is there anything that they can do? Would people use a spamfilter companion program that retrieved legitimate message from their junk folder, if one was available, or do they just want everyone else to use it. We are thinking of producing one that uses CaseKeys and Spamborders technologies to identify legitimate messages that have been incorrectly designated to the junk folder, and we would first like to know if there is a perceived need for such a program. For those that are interested, there is info on these technologies here: http://www.geobytes.com/casekey.htm Kind Regards Adrian McElligott Geobytes, inc. http://www.geobytes.com/ Geobytes - because everybody's somewhere! -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Renee Kennedy Subject: Transactional emails ignored > A large percentage of new registrants go through the > trouble of filling out our form, but do not confirm their > registration. Why do you suppose this is? - Dirk Lutzweiler, LED Digest 2296 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1379/55/ In order to confirm email addresses, we're offering a download that is valuable to our target market. We offer the download through a direct mail campaign, then we ask them to come to a web page to fill out some information - name, email, address, etc. We also remind them that they must add our email address to their address book in order to get the download. Then we send them the email with the download and they are subscribed to our list at the same time. At any point, they may unsubscribe. We also qualify that by giving us their email we may send them information in the future. People will actually call in if they cannot get that download, it's usually because our email to them has been filtered. Renee Kennedy -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Steven Rothberg Subject: Confirm messages You're seeing "conversion rates for confirmation messages are as low as 50% in some cases" and feel that's very serious? I've got news for you, that's a pretty good percentage for double opt-in. About a year ago, we ran a double opt-in campaign for one of the largest employers of college students and recent graduates in the country. Because the organization is part of the U.S. federal government, they required candidates to provide some additional information that corporate recruiters could never ask at the application stage. Leaving aside the issue of those "do as we say, not as we do" double standards that so many governmental units seem to love, the process was pretty straight forward. The job seekers found the job posting on our site just as they would any other job posting. When they clicked on the apply link, they were taken to another page on our site that was basically a form. They were asked for their basic contact information, date of birth, social security number, etc. (we auto-filled whatever information we had from their previous interactions with our site) and they clicked submit. They were told on that same page that they would receive an email that would ask them to confirm their interest in the position. The emails were sent immediately and contained a reminder about the position to which they had just applied and instructed them to click on a link in the email in order to confirm their interest. The email also indicated that their information could only be sent to the employer if the candidate clicked on the link to confirm their interest. Only about 10 percent did so. I wasn't surprised that a high percentage of candidates balked at providing their date of birth and social security number on-line at a site that they may have only just discovered, but the 90 percent who did not confirm their interest had already gotten past that hurdle. They had followed the entire process, provided all of the information required, and just had to click on a link to make all of that work worthwhile, yet 90 percent did not. I suspect that a large portion of that 90 percent did not respond to the emails because the emails were filtered out by their ISPs or anti-spam software or because they simply did not read the instructions. My point isn't to bemoan the recruitment advertising campaign that we ran. My point is that double opt-in is an extremely high standard and I believe one that is unrealistic for us to expect of typical users. Steven Rothberg, President and Founder CollegeRecruiter.com | Entry Level Jobs for Students & Recent Graduates! http://www.collegerecruiter.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Steve Pronger Subject: Email > This was the best technology ever invented for communication - > and for marketing - and the bastards have absolutely killed it. - Shel Horowitz, LED Digest 2297 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1381/55/ Have to agree with everything you said Shel. It's getting worse. Anti-spam laws here in Australia and the US have been an abject, miserable failure. Every day I receive hundreds of spam emails that bypass several filters. Simply register a new domain, as many of us here do frequently, and you can expect to start receiving spam on it real soon. Own dozens of domains and expect to receive the same moronic crap dozens of times in a single mail download. Every day I receive bounced emails where a domain I own has been forged as the sender's address. Why is it that in 2006, email technology can not recognise the true origin of an email and not simply bounce it to the supposed sender. How comforting it is to know that hundreds of thousands (millions?) of spam emails are sent with my domain, which also happens to be my name, as the sender. I frequently receive messages from my list manager that a subscriber, who double opted-in to my list, clicked on a "this is spam" button with AOL or Hotmail after receiving a message from me which was addressed to them personally. When I check my new leads I see a long list of unverified subscribers who never received the confirmation email. With all the spam being sent in my name and verified subscribers reporting me as a spammer to their ISP when I send them something they specifically asked to receive, is it any wonder? But I've given up trying to fight it. You can't win no matter what you do. And who has the time? As for email marketing, it may not be dead yet, but it's day has surely passed. Blogging and RSS will rise to the fore. It's just a matter of time. Steve Pronger http://www.stevepronger.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Joe Halbrook Subject: Email > I've gotten hundreds more spams per day in my spamfilter, many > of whose subject lines start with a first name followed by "wrote:" - Shel Horowitz, LED Digest 2297 Shel, I've also noticed a marked increase in these email attacks in the past weeks. I also see a lot of them coming from Sender addresses starting with "deborah" and with subject lines that start with "hi, it's" My solution so-far has been to simply add a subject line blacklist entry in my filtering solution for the strings: "more:" "hi, i'm" and "hi i'm" to trash all mail coming in with those strings in the subject line, as well as a Sender address blacklist entry for the string "deborah". That has stopped all of them, for me, as I always immediately delete all blacklisted email. I was careful to make sure that my whitelist entries on Sender addresses were honored BEFORE the blacklist entries (since I was the developer, I knew that to be the case) so that I didn't lose any good emails. The "hi, i'm" and "hi i'm" subject line blacklist entries may rarely cost me a few good emails, but as long as folks use my web contact forms (which always go to a secure RSS feed, instead of an email mailbox, to prevent spam abuse) I don't have to worry about losing business contacts. Note: If your current anti-spam strategy doesn't provide Subject Line blacklisting / filtering, you need to press that feature with the developers, or find a solution that does. Blocking of outbound email is something that will have to be addressed by your hosting company. Many set thresholds on the number of outbound mailings you can send each hour or day. You may have to work with them, to explain the nature of your business and your mailings. If they refuse to work with you, perhaps a viable option is to move your outbound mailings elsewhere. ?? Your idea of setting up a specific address for your newsletters may be prompted by the use of a "catch-all" mailbox. This is definitely a reason for the volume of unwanted email you receive. Spammers love to use dictionary attacks. If you currently use a catch-all mailbox, I would suggest the following strategy: 1. Create an email alias or forwarder for each of your separate newsletter addresses and any other valid addresses you want to receive legitimate email at. (If any are tied to auto-subscribe features, research how to best handle them.) Forward or alias these addresses to the previous "catch-all" mailbox that you will alter in step 2. (You may want to solicit help from your hosting company on how to setup alias addresses or forwarders on your mail server.) 2. Remove the "catch-all" address feature; instead use the catch-all as a single POP mailbox. (Again, you may need to solicit help from your hosting company on how to do this.) 3. Setup a rule that any other addresses within your domain(s) that are sent email receive a 550 error reply from your mailer daemon. (This may actually happen by default; check with your hosting company.) Note: It's tempting to define a nasty message to spammers in this rule-based bounce-back message, but fight the temptation. There may actually be valid business contacts who get that message, if they mistype your valid email address. :-) 4. Email your closest contacts, and let them know you've made a change to your inbound email processing. You might ask them to call you if they experience any problems getting a response to emails they send you. Better safe to cover all the bases. When these steps have been completed, you should stop seeing all the junk email that is sent in the daily dictionary spam attacks - those will get the bounce-back message and then get discarded. (Or, you may elect NOT to send the bounce-back, depending on how many of those, in turn, bounce back to you.) You should only get emails that are sent to the defined email addresses (your main mailbox, and the aliased or forwarded email). Of course, there may still be spam sent to those addresses, as well. So, your existing spam filtering solution can be used to handle that. I think if you follow these steps, you will find that you have an extra hour or two each day to spend with you family. Spammers are a crafty crowd, and staying one-step ahead of them is an unfortunate and sometimes daily challenge. But, it can be done. Best of success, Shel. Joe Halbrook http://www.cleanmymailbox.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: James Miller Subject: Refreshing Browser This is not really in the LED's remit. Or is it? I was asked by a client to provide a browser with no borders that refreshed. Not that easy, as you need to have some means of control, so that you can switch the program off and configure it. I solved that with a small control panel you can click in the corner. His application sounds bizarre in that he wanted to display text messages on a screen in an entertainment venue, such as a bar, pub or club. Think about it though and your mind races as to what purposes you'd use such a system for. I will not speculate here. But as you can see he wants the maximum screen and he wants it to look like television rather than a web browser. I succeeded and the result was an update to my Refreshing Browser. http://www.daisy.co.uk/RefreshingBrowser/index.html The applications have since cracked on apace. Ihave friends who use it to demo their product on the web as on a laptop the extra screen space is valuable. The program can now be script driven, so that sequences of web pages, such as news, sport and adverts can be put together as simple displays for a shop, cafe or pub. Thinking this through, you could have a company like Starbucks, that has a display in each cafe, that serves up a mixture of news, sports and adverts, silently to all their customers. It would only require a standard PC with a large plasma screen and an broadband Internet connection. All control would be central, with only a reboot required locally. I ran this through with the manager of my local computer store which is part of a large UK chain and he was very enthusiastic for all sorts of reasons, but mainly the central control which would save his staff time. I have received several enthusiastic reactions and feel it should be shared as many on this list, may have applications in their companies or clients. James Miller Daisy Analysis: www.daisy.co.uk ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." - Fight Club |
