Allure Is Doing It Wrong

Where do I begin...

First of all, I have no idea how I got on this list in the first place. I'm a dude, and I swear I have no interest in handbags and makeup. Seriously. I scanned the email, heading toward the footer for the opt out link when low and behold, their opt out procedure was to forward the email to a sketchy address beginning with "unsubscribe-ctg0aib62aacgk4qtkisrfejqyybag2a".


Then the next line reads: "You will no longer receive our special offers; however, you will continue to receive any newsletters to which you have subscribed."


Umm... no. I want to unsubscribe from ALL communications. But YOU'RE NOT LETTING ME!

At this point I was pretty annoyed... I hovered my mouse over the text of the email when I noticed that the whole email was click-able. So, I patronized them and clicked... low and behold the link was BROKEN. Invalid URL. Probably had something to do with the DOCTYPE being in the URL string. DOCTYPE? Really? It's not even necessary to include it in HTML emails. All you need are tables. No HTML tags, body tags, meta tags, etc.


Haven't marketers learned that it is absolutely essential to test emails nowadays? And furthermore, in today's day and age, you must include a means for the user to update their preferences.

Oh yeah... and they used a very spammy subject line. See below:


If anyone from Allure or Conde Nast Magazine is reading this and you need some help in the email department, give us a shout.

Conclusions of the Global S.P.A.M Diaries Project

Dylan over at eROI posted a link to a story today that immediately grabbed my attention: What Happens When You Reply to ALL of Your Spam. My first reaction was that it was just madness, who would even want to participate in this type of experiment or have time to do that considering all the spam we get. I read on to find out that it was an experiment that McAfee was running with the incentive of getting a free PC.

A housewife told her story which began on April Fool's Day. The experiment (Spammed Persistently All Month (S.P.A.M.)) was to answer each and every spam message and pop-up on their PC over a 30 day period. My first question that arose was, are they experimenting on the free PC and if so, who would want to use the test computer afterward considering the spam and pop ups were probably loaded with viruses? However considering McAfee's expertise in antivirus solutions, I'm assuming McAfee took care of that for them afterward.

McAfee's goal was to have 50 volunteers from around the world participate in this Global S.P.A.M. Diaries project. Some of the objectives of the campaign included:

• Allowing users to go where they never sought to before, to see if these susceptible calls to action where too good to be true

• Educating users in helping them identify spam emails and the risks associated with them

The total spam count allotted to 104,832 messages in a 30 day time frame. Each participant received roughly 2,096 messages or 70 messages a day. Of all the countries that participated the U.S. received the most spam with over 20,000 messages.

The conclusions from the campaign McAfee found included the following:

• Spam is still out there in abundance: Despite everyone’s efforts and precautions, it is a still a very real threat that grows at a phenomenal pace. Once subscribed, our participants proved it is almost impossible to unsubscribe from spam lists and as time passes this only gets worse.
  

• Spammers will stop at nothing! The nature of the spam received has given valuable insight into the social engineering aspects of spam that we have seen grow in the last few years; from religion, death and sick children to enticing people with offers of free products, cash and money for loans - the spammers will literally use any subject to scam people or steal valuable data from individuals or businesses. The current “credit crunch” means financial spam is very popular at the moment.
  

• Spam and cybercrime are linked: The fact that most participants received some phishing emails in such a short space of time, even though they had new email addresses, proves the danger spam carries. We should all take caution in opening suspicious emails and giving out our email addresses in cyberspace.
  

• Non-English Spam is growing: The diversification of languages of spam was higher than expected, proving that participants in different geographies receive different types of spam depending on their location. Local language spam is often harder to detect, because it is less common and this trend proves spammers are putting in more and more effort to remain inconspicuous. McAfee continues to investigate the growth of foreign language spam and predicts this as “an area to watch” in the future, as spam becomes more targeted and localized.
  

• Mobile spam has yet to really take off: Although this area doesn’t seem to have been fully embraced, many of our participants being asked to give mobile numbers. McAfee predicts mobile spam will start to grow at a similar speed to email-based spam in the near future.
  

• Even if people think they know the danger of spam, they don’t understand the true extent: McAfee’s participants came from all walks of life, from all over the world. Given their interest to take part in the experiment, they were all aware of the problem of spam, yet they were all shocked by the sheer amount of spam they attracted in a short time and the lengths the spammers would go to gain success.
  

• There’s no such thing as a free lunch! However tempting an offer looks, they are almost always too good to be true!

Source: McAfee Global Spam Diaries

Key takeaway from this experiment - be careful what you click on! If you are unsure of the 'From' recipient, don't open it!

It Says "Do NOT Reply"

How often do you get emails with a reply-to email address starting with "donotreply"? Or "something@donotreply.com" Well, if you're like me you get them quite often. It's somewhat rude and offensive how some companies believe they can contact you but they feel you're not worthy enough to contact them in return. The nerve!

Well, for one programmer based out of Seattle, WA, this has been a blessing... since he owns the domain "donotreply.com". On a daily basis his inbox is littered with emails from random customers of Fortune 500 companies, banks (which include sensitive account information), governmental departments and the like (spammers too, naturally).

They have a blog here, that documents all of their more interesting cases. Its certainly worth a read.

To all companies that use this practice: STOP IT. Otherwise, you may see your company listed on donotreply's blog. Not good for your Human Resources or Customer Service departments alike.

Thanks to MailChimp for pointing this out.

Spamology

Spamology is an interactive website environment which uses audiovisual representations of word frequencies in spam e-mail messages. Its creators have collected data from over 2,000,000 emails originating from all over the world over the past 10 years (1997-2008). The higher the stack, the more frequent the use of the 'spammy' word.

You'd think common spammy words such as Viagra, FREE, or CIALIS would have the largest stacks (and undoubtedly, they are VERY high stacks), but its common words such as "with" or "but" that have the highest stack sizes.

The Axe Effect: Using SPAM to Their Advantage?

A co-worker recently passed me a link to a video showing one of the most creative (yet spammiest) email campaigns I’ve ever seen. The campaign is for Axe Body Spray in Germany. It’s a viral campaign which when the referred user gets the email and clicks on the link embedded within, they’re sent to a landing page which displays a can of Axe Body Spray. When you click on the can, it plays a songs and animates.

Then…

The user gets 15 emails from women, all with subject lines along the lines of “Hmm… hot computer! But not as hot as you =)” and “Can you do me a favor? Then I can give you my flavor!” with the final email being “You just got the AXE EFFECT!”

Now, this is an extremely creative and unique way to go about a viral email campaign, but it’s a very risky move… the agency who came up with this campaign obviously didn’t take Can-Spam compliance laws into consideration when they were executing this. I’m sure many major email clients blocked the IP this email was being sent from.

Do you think the benefits outweigh the risks in this case?

Check out the video here.

PDF Spam On the Rise

Recently, the amount of spam hitting inboxes has stayed relatively steady, but according to Symantec (an internet security firm based out of Cupertino, CA), the tactics used by spammers is changing.

Spammers are shifting from image-embedded emails to PDF-attached emails, duping many – especially those checking their email through business-related accounts. PDF spam now makes up two to eight percent of all spam.

The nuisance of spam will never go away. It’s incorporating of other file types besides PDFs too, such as zip files and Excel files, which will only increase the amount of confusion on what emails, are “safe” to open for the general public.

The only surefire way to stop spam dead in its tracks is for users to hotly embrace the use of whitelists and address books.

Read more here.

Live Mail's Unsubscribe Button

Recently Microsoft has had the reputation to be a little hit-and-miss. Whether it’s with their excessive security checks when browsing with IE7, the thoroughly disappointing Outlook ’07 package or their lack of CSS support with Live Mail. But Live Mail isn’t all that bad… In actuality, there are a few features that are fairly exceptional, especially for all email marketers across the board. Case in point: the implementation of an “Unsubscribe” button.

The new unsubscribe button displays in place of a report spam button, but only if the user’s preferences are set up correctly. Instructions on how to set up the unsubscribe button can be found here.

When the button is clicked, it will take the user to a landing page, created by the marketer where they can determine what email they want to opt-out from.

This will certainly help all email marketers’ deliverability rates. Without a report spam button, users won’t be prone to mistakenly report an email (that they opted-in to receive, mind you) as spam and the sender's IP address will be less likely to be blacklisted.

This is one of the better features Microsoft has incorporated to any of their products in a long, long time. Kudos Microsoft, you’re on the right path toward redemption.

A Simple Solution to Combat SPAM

There are numerous FREE websites out there with the capability to check your email’s From Address, Subject Line and the Content to see if anything might be ‘questionable’ and most likely marked as spam. Get into the habit of referencing any of the following sites for each and every email before you send it live.

• http://spamcheck.sitesell.com/
• http://www.gravitymail.com/spamscore.php
• http://www.programmersheaven.com/webtools/Spam-Checker/spamchecker.aspx
• http://www.swiftpage.com/site/SpamCheck.htm
  

If your emails are constantly being marked as SPAM, ISPs will pick up on it; thus leading to your IP being blacklisted – considerably lowering your chances of reaching your (potential) audience.