How to Avoid Spam Filters Blog
Proper Email Delivery and a Good Email Reputation Mean Everything!

I was just in Gmail and went to click the delete button on one of my own emails that arrives there as a test.

Since the delete button is only a quarter inch from the spam button, I, in a hurry I clicked the wrong one. I had just marked my own message as spam.

I wonder how many times that happens by mistake to our emails. What do you think?

The court unanimously agreed with Jeremy Jaynes’ argument that the law violates free-speech and overturns spammer conviction, setting the stage for a Supreme Court spam laws showdown!

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The Virginia Supreme Court declared the state’s anti-spam law unconstitutional Friday and reversed the conviction of a man once considered one of the world’s most prolific spammers.

The court unanimously agreed with Jeremy Jaynes’ argument that the law violates the free-speech protections of the First Amendment because it does not just restrict commercial e-mails — it restricts other unsolicited messages as well. Most other states also have anti-spam laws, and there is a federal CAN-SPAM Act as well, but those laws apply only to commercial e-mail pitches.

The Virginia law ”is unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails, including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Justice G. Steven Agee wrote.

Agee wrote that ”were the Federalist Papers just being published today via e-mail, that transmission by Publius would violate the statute.” Publius was the pseudonym used by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay in essays urging ratification of the Constitution.

”In my view, the case was never about Jeremy Jaynes — it was about the First Amendment,” said Jaynes’ attorney, Thomas M. Wolf. ”The argument was never that there’s a constitutional right to send commercial spam. It was that the government cannot criminalize the sending of noncommercial e-mail for political and religious purposes, and that is what this statute did.”

Lawyers for the state had argued that the First Amendment doesn’t apply because the Virginia law bars trespassing on privately owned e-mail servers through phony e-mail routing and transmission information. The court rejected that characterization of the law.

Attorney General Bob McDonnell said he was ”deeply disappointed” and vowed to take the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court.

”Jeremy Jaynes used the private property of Internet service providers to defraud individuals worldwide,” McDonnell said. ”This was not a matter of free speech, it was fraud. Virginia acted appropriately to use this new law to put an end to this criminal behavior.”

John Levine, a board member of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail and one of the state’s expert witnesses in the Jaynes case, said he too was disappointed, but added that the ruling won’t have broad repercussions because Virginia is the only state that prohibits noncommercial spam.

”I don’t see it as a fatal setback for anti-spam law,” Levine said.

In 2004, Jaynes became the first person in the country to be convicted of a felony for sending unsolicited bulk e-mail. Authorities claimed Jaynes sent up to 10 million e-mails a day from his home in Raleigh, N.C. He was sentenced to nine years but is currently serving time in federal prison for an unrelated securities fraud conviction unrelated to the Virginia case, Wolf said.

Jaynes was charged in the spam case in Virginia because the e-mails went through an AOL server there.

The Virginia Supreme Court last February affirmed Jaynes’ conviction on several grounds but later agreed, without explanation, to reconsider the First Amendment issue. Jaynes was allowed to argue that the law unconstitutionally infringed on political and religious speech even though all his spam was commercial.

Wolf said sending commercial spam is still illegal in Virginia under the federal CAN-SPAM Act. However, he said the federal law does not apply to Jaynes because it was adopted after he sent the e-mails that were the basis for the state charges.

New Advice From Return Path and PDF

Return Path’s Q2 2008 Reputation Benchmark Report (pdf) found e-mails sent from “legitimate” e-mail servers averaged a delivery rate of 56 percent. 20 percent were rejected; 8 percent filtered out of the inbox. The rest — 16 percent — were bounces.

So nearly half of the time, e-mail marketers’ messages don’t get through. But there are ways to increase deliverability, insists George Bilbrey, Return Path’s general manager of delivery assurance. Here are five:

Email Delivery: Should I Add My Autoresponder’s SPF Records to My Domain?

I recently ran across a post that claimed that by adding the SPF records of the writers autoresponder (in this case AWeber) that he expected to get past being blocked by a Canadian ISP. This is complete crap because any authentication technology associates the email in question with the sending domain and IP address not the email from address or the return email address.

I even contacted AWeber’s CEO Tom Kulzer with this scenario just to be absolutely sure and here is the email excerpt.

Chris Lang wrote:

Let’s say that an ISP receives my email from AWeber with my from address and reply address in the header. Do they look at my SPF record to see if I have a SPF DNS entry associated with your (my autoresponder) email servers?

Tom Kulzer said

They look at aweber.com SPF records.

Chris:

Also is all email sent from AWeber under the address keywebdata (at) aweber.com sent from the same IP address everytime?

Tom Kulzer:

It’s not sent from the same single IP, but load balanced across the same range of IP addresses. Those ranges can all be found in our SPF record directly or in our FAQ on the website.

Chris:

In other words does it matter if authentication records associate my domain and from address with yours?

Tom:

Does sending from the same single IP matter? No.

Does sending from the same group of IP’s matter that have an excellent reputation and reliable volume of mail built over a long period of time matter? Absolutely, yes.

Chris:

Also is there any data to support a higher delivery rate due to the use of SPF, Sender Id and DKIM?

Tom:

Not that I’ve seen which clearly shows this, but general industry knowledge of how various ISP’s build reputations
of senders and make delivery choices tells me it does help support higher delivery rates.

Chris:

Tom you have been a wealth of information on email delivery to us all many times, I just want to thank you again for taking time away from your business to set us straight.

How could you possibly ruin your Email Delivery and mark your own email IP address as sending spam?

Yes you really can be clicking the “This is Spam” button on yourself. It happens quite easily and you may have already done this yourself.

The problem is that an automated spam filter is simply unable to determine what is spam and what is a forward. Here’s a break down of the problem using Comcast as an example.

You setup an auto forwarder from your domain to your Comcast email account. This also occurs often when you forward email from your work email account.

You are forwarding mail from you@yourdomain.com to you@Comcast.com.

When your customers send emails to you@yourdomain.com the email gets forwarded to you@Comcast.com

One day you receive some spam at you@yourdomain.com, which was auto forwarded directly from you@Comcast.com.

You open your you@Comcast.com mail box and see the spam, so you click to “Mark it as SPAM” and add it to your Comcast spam filter . You have just entered a spam complaint against your own email server! Comcast’s spam filter does not register the originator of the email as the spammer - instead, it registers the last place the email came from as the Spammer and in this case and the last place the email came from is your email server which is the outgoing email server for hosts you@yourdomain.com.

Comcast will then blacklist the entire mail server so that no one can send email to any Comcast email accounts.

They will then contact your host and ask that your domain be deleted.

Until then Comcast will block all email from the outgoing SMTP servers associated with your server (thru reverse DNS).

Solution

What do I need to do you ask?

You need to login to your email admin on your domain and go through your email accounts and take off any forwarding that forwards email to any account or any other ISP.

Also check to make sure your email Alias is not forwarding to any email account or any other ISP.

Although it might be an inconvenience to many, I think this decision is necessary to protect our mail servers from being blacklisted by ISPs in this way.

Verizon, Comcast or AOL certainly do nothing to investigate the source of the spam and would rather shut down a server than take a minute to check it out.

Please note, this does not mean you cannot send emails to Verizon, Comcast, AOL or other ISP based email accounts. This simply means you should not set your email account to auto forward emails. You will still be able to compose your own email to ISP users, and you will be able to forward an email to those users from your mailbox manually.

Double opt in, why you should not care if your double opt in rate is crappy and what to do about it if it sucks!

This double opt in article came to be written because of a number of people whining about double opt in and AWeber. It was written very quickly and with a little heat, most of which I have removed.

AWeber delivers 97% of the email they send to the inbox. Most others are at 80%. 20% more delivery = 20% more profits. Do the math.

Next AWeber is an autoresponder not just a list manager. The ability to set up preset marketing delivered at the rate you choose is priceless. Search “autoresponder tips” if you do not understand this.

Double opt in prevents spam complaints. Spam complaints are the result of a recipient clicking the “this is spam button” and will get you blocked faster than anything else. A visitor cannot misspell their email address and send someone else your emails with double opt in.

Double opt in also saves your email reputation because you are not bouncing emails to bad addresses. Those same misspelled emails that get the spam button clicked can bounce when the recipient does not exist. ISPs keep track of bounced emails and the server it is sent from. The more bounces, the lower your email reputation score.

The very first time someone clicks the “this is spam” button on an email you sent without double opt in can get you banned by the receiving ISP. Your host may delete your domain and you are going to definitely get listed on RBLs (real time blacklists).

Sure you can triple your opt in rate by not using double opt in, but all it takes is a five or six spam complaints and you are history! NO site, NO domain, GONE. Forever.

The bottom line here is still that any email service that uses single opt in is just not going to have high delivery rates especially to Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft and that is probably 90% of the email inboxes these days.

Now let’s consider this: If they won’t confirm their address will they open your emails that you send in the future?

Will these readers that wouldn’t double opt in click thru to your site from emails?

Will these same people enter their credit card in your forms when they wouldn’t even double opt in?

Now let’s talk about increasing your email delivery and double opt in rate

When someone signs up via a AWeber form you have a hidden field named “redirect”

Here you can enter a URL on your site that a lead is sent to rather than a AWeber page.

Here you need to have an irresistible incentive to get the lead to open your email and click the link.

Stuart, I am sure your content rocks but don’t be insulted here, content just ain’t goona do it.

Here is the page I use on my site: email delivery ebook and the four chapter incentive.

Next to stay out of the spam folder you need to get you subscriber to whitelist you.

Email whitelist generator will generate these instructions for you.

Finally when your lead clicks the AWeber confirmation link there is one more page that you can send your new subscriber to.

This page is configurable in the AWeber console.

Don’t just send them to some lame thank you page, surprise them with an unannounced bonus or at least send them to some good content that is new and worthwhile.

If your sales letter has a good conversion rate and content in addition to the sales process, send them there on the click thru confirmation. But whatever you do the whole process should brand you as an authority on your subject.

Hope this helps,

Chris Lang

New CAN SPAM provisions released, not anything ground breaking

• An email recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her email address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply email message or visiting a single Web page to opt out of receiving future email from a sender.

• The definition of “sender” was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements.

• A “sender” of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under U.S. Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a “valid physical postal address.”

• A definition of the term “person” was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.

You can read the full CAN SPAM FTC press release here.

Yahoo is soon to start accepting Sender Score Certified via Return Path!

Yahoo using Sender Score Certified whitelist and Return Path was quietly made public in January 2008, “Yahoo! is implementing the scheme and will begin checking using it sometime in spring.” We have not heard much since. My connection at Return Path just mentioned Yahoo the other day and brought it back to mind.

Return Path blog says “Receivers that accept the Sender Score Certified whitelist include, among others, Windows Live Hotmail, Time Warner Cable, GoDaddy and soon Yahoo! and Yahoo! operated email properties.”

Maybe this is why Yahoo has been such a nightmare to deliver to lately and why Yahoo pulled it’s FBL in March.

Since they announced that Comcast would offer an FBL managed by Return Path I have been expecting the Yahoo Sender Score Certified Return Path full press release to come forth.

I don’t mean to be a nutty conspiracy theorist here, but first Comcast has no whitelist, no FBL and is tough to get your email delivered to. Then Comcast offers an FBL through Return Path. Next, it’s Yahoo, who pulls their FBL, calling it an end to a beta, is impossible to deliver any email to for months and now is poised to solve it all with Sender Score Certified and Return Path.

As always I invite your comments below! = Chris Lang

Part of avoiding spam filters is using other forms of social media.

If you have ever wondered how blogs get those cool Technorati buttons on their site, here it is.

Create a log in, or log in to Technorati, then go thru the “claim blog” process. Once you are done it will provide you with the code to add the buttons to your site.

Hope this helps! = Chris Lang

Comcast Feedback Loop is Finally Available, Now How About a Real Whitelist?

Comcast Feedback Loop, or FBL, is finally available after being the email delivery nightmare of Yahoo proportions. Guess what, it is powered by Return Path.. But hey, this FBL looks good to me. Now if they would offer an open, real comcast whitelist rather than just the Sender Score Certified, that none of us lowly bloggers can afford we might not hate you so much Comcast.

From Return Path’s blog:

“We now host feedback loops for Comcast, USA.net, and Mailtrust and we are in the process of setting up half a dozen more over the next few months. A large portion of our business has always been to help senders understand how to handle the feedback they’re receiving, so this is a customer support task that we are uniquely capable of handling - and our ISP partners appreciate it.”

Just what is a Feedback Loop or FBL

Let’s say one of your recipients clicks the “report spam” button in Yahoo Mail. A copy of that email is saved in Yahoo’s database and the same thing happens at Hotmail, Gmail, AOL and Window Live Mail. The ISP can then use these spam reports to determine your whitelisting eligibility and of course has a direct effect your email reputation.

Feedback loops, or FBLs come into play here for us lowly senders like this. When someone does click the “spam button”, you, get a copy of the report. This does a number of things for you.

It let’s you know that one of your emails is so far off topic / track, unreadable, or just plain sucked that one of your readers clicked the spam button on you.

It allows you to immediately remove this person. Remember, this button clicker did not unsubscribe. They still get your emails! You want to manually remove them NOW.

Feedback loops also allow you to head off any problems with your host, because they are getting a copy of this as well and may take action against your site / hosting with out contacting you. BTW your host is the next person to contact.

I have a complete list of all ISPs, their FBL application URLs, what to do when you do receive a spam complaint and what is required to get on a ISP feedback loop in, you guessed it, my email delivery book, downloadable in seconds. By the time you figure out FBLs you could have already read my 80 page book made twice the money you spent on it by delivering more email.