MailChimp Blog

Top Spammer Arrested

Instead of waking up to +600 spam messages today, I only got 421.

They say it's because this spammer got arrested:

A 27-year-old man described as one of the world's most prolific spammers was arrested Wednesday, and federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070531/ap_on_hi_te/spam_arrest

Pixel Awards 2007 Call for Entries

Deep down, designers know that design awards are nothing special, and they don't validate you as a designer with real talent (unless you win one!).

One exception, IMHO, is the Pixel Award. It's a new design award (started by an actual designer) that showcases some great talent, and they give trophies that are works of art (literally---works of art).

MailChimp was a sponsor last year, so we got one of their cool robot/space invader plaques to hang on our wall. When people visit, they pass by all our other trophies (and our animatronic monkey head) and go straight for the Pixel Award. It's just too cool.

This year, they've got an artist (Tsega Dinka) making individual awards for each category. Very nice. Check out the different 10" x 10" paintings over at the Pixel Awards website:

http://www.pixelawards.com/

If you're one of those creative agencies that already has countless plexiglass trophies and golden pencils out in your lobby, you should try to win a Pixel Award this year. There are 20 categories, like "Fashion" and "Animation" and "Non-profit" and "Vegetarian" and "Weird."

We're a sponsor this year, too. Besides their nifty works of art, you'll also win 500 MailChimp email credits. If you win, you could use MailChimp to take a picture of yourself holding your prize, and email it in a newsletter to 500 friends, family members, and clients. Not to gloat or anything. Just because they'd probably be happy for you. :-)

Microsoft sues over spam sent through Hotmail

I've always secretly felt that some ISPs were slightly hypocritical when it comes to "fighting spam." On the one hand, they make ESPs like MailChimp follow best practices to make sure spam doesn't originate from our system and end up in theirs. They spend bazillions of dollars to keep spam from reaching their users' inboxes. That's good.

But in a way, they're a part of their own problem...

You see, at MailChimp, we go through a lot of work to make sure spammers don't sign up and pollute the system. Because if spammers get into MailChimp, they can get us blacklisted fast by big ISPs like Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, AOL, etc. One bad apple can spoil it for the rest of our legit customers.

That's why a human review team has to approve every new account before they can send emails from MailChimp. It's also why ESPs like us have to get on those ISPs' feedback loops. We all know that if spammers get in, the big  900-lb gorilla ISPs will block us. They have the leverage to make us shut down accounts when senders get too many spam complaints (even if the sender is legit). Too many complaints, you're blocked. They don't care who you are.

Anyways, for the most part, spammers rarely visit MailChimp, because they have much better (more evil) ways of sending mass amounts of email anonymously.

But when spammers DO try to get in, they always have one thing in common: they're using a free email account from Yahoo!Mail, Hotmail, MSN, etc. to hide their identity.

That's why we block free trials when someone tries to sign up with an email account from those "free email" ISPs (we actually block several thousand "free email" domains, and the list is constantly growing).

That's where I start wondering. We have to go through so much trouble to keep spam from reaching ISPs like Yahoo and Hotmail. But it's those very ISPs that seem to help spammers get their work done in the first place!

Free email accounts make it too easy to hide your identity.

Granted, spammers can't easily sign up for a Yahoo! or Hotmail account and send a million pieces of spam from that ISP. I'm not saying free email accounts are easy to send spam with.  Spammers just use those free email accounts like an offshore bank. When they send spam, and idiots signup for Viagra or Rol3x watches, their information is saved in some free email account for the spammer to retrieve later.

If companies like Yahoo and Microsoft stopped offering free email accounts altogether, I think the spam problem would go down significantly.

Maybe I'd just get 590 spams a day, instead of 600. And it wouldn't just help with the spam problem. We'd certainly have fewer forum trolls. Maybe content on the Internet in general would get a big boost in quality. Think of all the bandwidth we'd free up.

At least some of those big ISPs are starting to sue people for using their services to spam:

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/32227/118/

Maybe they do care afterall?

SenderID Authentication For Your MailChimp Campaigns

MailChimp customers: You can now setup your DNS to include our MailChimp servers in your SPF record (so that your campaigns will be SenderID authenticated).

We sent out the news recently in a System Alert, but just in case you didn't get it, here are the details...

If you have access to and can modify your DNS, add this bit of code to your SPF text record to enable SenderID Authentication for all your MailChimp campaigns:

include:servers.mcsv.net

For example, your SPF record might look something like this:

v=spf1 mx ptr include:servers.mcsv.net ~all

If you have absolutely no idea what any of this means, print this out and give it to your IT group (wrap it in a candy bar to expedite it). Tell them your email campaigns will have a little better deliverability if they do this for you.

After we sent our email about this, we got a ton of questions from our customers. So here's a little information that might help:

• Yes, authentication can be confusing as hell. For more information on SenderID authentication, visit this Microsoft website
• Why this is important: ISPs (like AOL, Hotmail, MSN, Bellsouth, Yahoo, etc.) are starting to check incoming emails for authentication. If your email is not authenticated, it looks slightly suspicious to them, and they run it through their spam filters extra, super-duper hard. If your emails are authenticated, they run them through their spam filters slightly less extra super-duper hard. Some ISPs are marking emails that are authenticated with special badges, indicating they're slightly more 'trustworthy.'
• SenderID is only one type of authentication (but it's getting very, very popular, and is pretty easy to implement, compared to DKIM authentication).
• How SenderID authentication works: Basically, when you send an email using MailChimp, but your reply-to address is "yourcompany.com" it kind of looks suspicious to ISPs. So a receiving ISP would ask, "Why does it say it's from "yourcompany.com" when I can tell it came from MailChimp's servers (mcsv1.net, mcsv2.net, mcsv3.net...etc)" But so long as your email isn't very spammy, it's usually okay, and you have nothing to worry about. They'll just let it slide. But ISPs are increasingly checking for SenderID authentication now. So when you send your email campaign and put "yourcompany.com" in the reply-to, a receiving ISP will go to "yourcompany.com" and ask if MailChimp is an impostor, or if we're truly authorized to send emails on your behalf. Adding that line of code tells ISPs, "Yeah, MailChimp's cool. You can trust him."
• The ISP where you host your website and manage your DNS might not let you modify your DNS records (it's a pretty advanced feature, not offered in common small business hosting packages). Some will let you modify your mx-records, but not SPF. You need to be able to edit your SPF record.
  
• If you can't modify your SPF record, all is not lost. We will be offering an alternative for you later (details in the System Alert we sent to all customers)
• This is not the same as SPF authentication. SPF authentication is different from SenderID authentication, even though to make SenderID work, you have to edit your SPF record. Don't ask. For a really technical explanation, go here.
  
• After you've setup your SPF record on your DNS, you can check your work. Use MailChimp to send an email to: check-auth@verifier.port25.com and you will  get a bounce back. The bounce back will tell you if the message passed SenderID authentication.
• Some people have asked us, "What if my ISP doesn't allow me to edit my DNS' SPF records?" Well, we could tell you to switch ISPs, or to use a separate DNS hosting service, but that's a huge pain, and we're not convinced it's totally worth it right now. We haven't seen lack of authentication really hurt anyone's campaigns. But having authentication can sometimes help a little (here's one case we've seen just recently). So if you can't really edit your DNS, don't worry too much about this. We'll be offering alternatives for you soon.
• We can set you up with DKIM authentication on MailChimp too. But it's only worth it if you send a very high volume of emails on a very regular basis. You will need a <a href="http://www.mailchimp.com/add-ons/">MailChimp PRO</a> account.

Updated Feedback Loop Reports (abuse complaints)

MailChimp Enhancement:

We've just been added to the feedback loop of another (very) major ISP, and you should start seeing some new data in your Abuse Reports.

For those of you who don't know, a feedback loop is sort of a secret reporting system used by ISPs to warn senders when they've been getting too many spam complaints about your campaigns. We use feedback loops to automatically remove complainers from our users' lists. More importantly, we use FBLs to find customers with dirty, old, or bad lists and who need to be shut down before they spoil things for the rest of our customers.

Read more about feedback loops here.

Who's the new ISP? We can't tell you. Because on the record, they don't have a feedback loop. They're still in beta.

So in your abuse reports stats, you'll see "Unavailable Email" if anyone from this particular ISP reports your campaign as spam. Although we can't show you who complained, rest assured we've automatically removed that person from your list.

Feedback loops MailChimp monitors for you:

• AOL
• Hotmail/MSN
• Outblaze
• Roadrunner
• SpamCop
• United Online: Netzero, Juno, etc
• (unnamed)

Image-based Spam On The Decline?

An article from PCWorld that suggests image-based spam might be on the decline.

http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/004489.html

At MailChimp, we're still shocked at all the designers and marketers who are sending HTML emails that are nothing but big images. They don't seem to realize that an all-image legit email campaign looks the same as an all-image spam campaign.

Related: Stupid Email Design Mistakes

Email Marketing Ideas for Travel Industry

Ken Magill has some creative ways a luxury ski resort operator uses email marketing.

http://chiefmarketer.com/Channels/online/email_ski_resort/

Memorial Day Support Availability

On the record, the MailChimp support team will be off in observance of Memorial Day on Monday, and will return on Tuesday.

Off the record, we almost never unhook ourselves from email, so we'll be watching for any tickets and issues every once in a while.

Have a safe and happy Memorial Day, and hope you get a moment to remember our heroes.

Shoebox Greetings Blog (A tiny little division of Hallmark)

When we were kids, my sister and I used to make greeting cards. Not the crappy glue and glitter kind, mind you. Ours were pop-up cards. They had moving parts. She'd draw all the pictures, cut out the parts, color the cards, and assemble the pieces. I'd sit on the floor and watch her work. We made a good team.

I later went on to  co-create Lollipopcards.com, an online greeting cards website (the technology eventually became the engine behind earlier versions of MailChimp).

My sister, on the other hand, went on to become an editor at some little company called "Hallmark cards." Poor girl. She just didn't have the drive to follow her dreams, I guess.

Anyways, she just pointed me to their new Shoebox Greetings blog.

If you want a nice example of a "corporate" marketing blog with personality, here you go. If they can keep it up, it's going to be a great blog.

When she was just an intern at this "Hall-Mark" startup, I remember my sister used to bring home a secret, underground newsletter that the Hallmark creatives distributed around the office. It had all kinds of crazy, almost-demented stuff (I said "almost" so as not to offend any people there---but just between you and me, those people can be pretty friggin' demented) that the artists would draw. You could tell they were venting their frustrations after designing happy-fluffy-cutesy cards all day. It was really an awesome newsletter. Now that she's been there a while, she of course denies its existence.

But they do post some of their rejected cards under the "Funny, But No" section of the blog. They're hilarious. There's a book full of those rejected cards too.

I'm trying to send myself a test, but keep getting blocked

Question: "I'm trying to send myself a test campaign, but keep getting blocked. What's wrong with MailChimp?"

Answer:

It's not us. It's because you are sending an email from yourself, to yourself. But behind the scenes, the email is actually originating from MailChimp's server. Your company's spam filter or email firewall thinks that the email must be an impostor.

You don't believe me. Nobody ever believes it when we explain that to them.

Here's some proof, and here's what you can do...

Dan, our customer service guy here at MailChimp, saw an interesting article on CNN, and he wanted to send a copy to himself for later. He clicked the "forward to friend" link.  He entered the same email address under both the "From" and "To" fields (he wanted to send an email from himself, to himself), and this is the warning he got:

Apparently, CNN's forward-to-friend vendor is experiencing the same issue. It's pretty common. We only have a few thousand customers on MailChimp. I can't imagine how many times CNN deals with this problem (apparently, it's enough for them to post a message about it).

If you can't seem to send test campaigns to yourself, one thing you can do is tell your company's IT group to "white list" MailChimp. They'd basically need to tell your spam filter to go ahead and just trust all emails from MailChimp, even if they look like an impostor. That'll help you get your test campaigns delivered internally for review. Your IT group would basically need to know the IP addresses that we use. Contact us for that information.

Another tactic (if you don't want IT to get involved) is to change the "reply-to" address to some other email account, such as your home email address. Just remember to go back and change that before you actually send to your list!

Finally, if you have access to your DNS (or if you have access to a nerd who has access to your DNS) it's helpful if you setup an SPF record for your DNS, to authenticate your email campaigns. It basically says, "If you receive an email that claims to be from my company, but it's actually sent from a MailChimp server, it's okay---we've approved it."

To do that, your IT group would just need to add this code to their SPF record:

v=spf1 mx ptr include:servers.mcsv.net ~all

This would basically make all your campaigns you send from MailChimp SenderID authenticated, which can actually help your deliverability. To learn more about email authentication, check out the Microsoft website. More and more big ISPs are checking for authentication, so if you have the ability to add this to your DNS, you should go ahead and do it sooner than later.

Pathetic, Clingy Unsubscribe Pages

Our friend Paul was recently taken to this unsubscribe landing page:

Adds Paul:

"I landed on this page after clicking on an unsubscribe button in their email. Also the 'check here to unsubscribe' box was unchecked when I got there."

Siiiiiiiiiiigh. Why would you want to make unsubscribing so complicated?

If you send an email to a subscriber, and they want to unsubscribe, they obviously don't want to hear from you. Maybe they're swamped with too many emails. Maybe they don't find you relevant anymore.

Whatever the case, you shouldn't want to send email to them anymore. It's wasted bandwidth. Plus, you're just pissing off potential customers. When I get taken to unsubscribe pages with forms I have to fill out (especially the kind that require passwords) I abandon the form, and simply mark future emails from that sender as junk. In my mind, they deserve it (even if I opted-in at some point in the past).

Making unsubscribing a hassle is like calling someone over and over again, after they've just dumped you. You're not going to nag them into liking you again. You just look desperate and pathetic.

Let them go. Make unsubscribing easy.

In MailChimp, when a subscriber to your list clicks "unsubscribe" he is instantly removed from your list (not only is that a nice thing to do, but it prevents lawsuits like this one ). They're taken to a landing page that says, "You have been removed." One not-so-annoying thing you can do at this point is edit that landing page to include a link to some quick online survey, asking for feedback (so you can improve your content).

If you love your subscribers, set them free. If they come back, they're yours forever. If they don't, then heck, it was a waste of bandwidth and money emailing them anyways, so it's all good.

Related: "What's a normal unsubscribe rate?"

Don't Assume We Know You

A bunch of marketers (who are also bloggers) got the same piece of spam yesterday. I got it too. It was about how not to spam bloggers.

It started out with:

Countless accounts of “PR Flaks” who have spammed bloggers, mis-targeted pitches or just plain gotten blogger relations wrong fill the Internet. Don’t risk finding your next pitch blasted on your favorite blog!

Their offer:

Download the FREE Vocus white paper Five Golden Rules for Blogger Relations to get insights on how today’s PR professionals can successfully incorporate blogger relations into their PR strategy and build effective relationships straight from four of the top blogging experts in the industry!

Who the heck is Vocus, and how'd they get my email address?!?!?

Then I found another blogger complaining about this spam. He posted the spam to his blog (which is exactly what Vocus wants to teach us how to avoid) and when people started investigating, we discovered that the one thing we all had in common was that we've all used a service called PRWeb to distribute a press release at some time in the past.

Then we learned that Vocus had recently acquired PRWeb.

Ooooooh, so they were sending out an email to their customers. Okay, I guess that's not spam. Problem is, most of us had no idea we were Vocus customers.

It really would have helped if they used PRWeb somewhere (like in the From: or Subject: fields) so we could trust it. Maybe even a permission reminder, telling us that "You are receiving this email because you are a PRWeb Customer, and PRWeb is a service of Vocus..."

We see this countless times at MailChimp. Companies are in a rush to "blast their customers" with some offer, or some exciting (to whom?) company news, and they don't consider that the majority of their recipients will simply get the email and ask, "Who the @#$% Are You, And How'd You Get My Email?"

What happens next? They get too many spam complaints and they get their company domain name blacklisted. Even worse, they get their email posted on some blog for all the world to see.

Vocus looks like they mean well. They just made a simple mistake (that a lot of marketers make). And the whitepaper they're offering? It actually looks useful.

If you haven't contacted your list in a while, PLEASE send a re-introduction campaign. Don't just assume people remember who you are, and definitely don't assume they want to hear your news.

Here's an excellent example from ModernPostcard on how to re-introduce yourself to your customers.

Quick Tip: Always Schedule Campaigns for Later

Dan is our customer support guy. He's the one you talk to whenever you click the "Live Chat" button if you have a problem or question in MailChimp. Needless to say, Dan has seen a lot of "oopsies."

I overheard him giving one of our customers a nice tip:

Let's say you just finished building your email campaign, and you're ready to send it to your list. Even if you know it's ready to go, always schedule it for later. You can set it to 15 minutes from now, 30 minutes from now, whatever. Just don't send it NOW. Because after you click the submit button, you will inevitably think of something you forgot to add. Or some link you coded wrong. You always have last minute changes. Scheduling for later gives you some time to jump back in and edit.

And here's a related article over at AWeber

Forwarded Emails Causing Blacklisting Problems

Mark Brownlow reports how Stanford and Boston College have experienced some blacklisting problems when students automatically forward all their email from school to their personal accounts at AOL, Yahoo, etc. Basically, when students get spam sent to their school account, and they forward it to their AOL account, AOL thinks the school is spamming them, and blacklists the school's email server.

We've reported somewhat similar delivery "kookiness" here on the MailChimp blog, when people automatically forward their work emails to their wireless devices and home accounts.

Real Estate Signage and Email Marketing

In Atlanta, condos are popping up left and right. Close your eyes and throw a rock in any direction, and you'll hit some real estate signage of some sort.

I pass these 3 signs almost every day. They're about 50 feet apart from each other, which is why I found it interesting to see their different approaches to marketing...

This one's pretty typical of all the signs I see around the city. You get the pencil illustration, a phone number, and that's it. They actually do have a website, but you've got to Google for it.

This one at least has a website. That's nice. I can go back home and find out more before talking to a sales person.

This is the first sign I've ever seen with a website and a call to action. It actually made me want to check out the website to find out what this exclusive "priority buyers list" looked like. Unfortunately, it was nowhere to be found. A+ on concept, D- for execution.

Blurb Books for Your Business

Here's a cool service I stumbled upon over at John Jantsch's Ducttapemerketing blog.

It's called a Blurb Book. You upload photos and text, and they make a hardcover book for you.

Yeah, we've seen these things before, where you can build your own photo album online.

But Blurb looks interesting because it's software you run on your computer. That should make it much faster and easier to build a book than uploading pictures to a website and typing text into little tiny form fields.

And John suggests interesting ways you can use these Blurb Books for your business:

• Real estate agents can use them to make scrapbooks for clients
• Home remodelers can chronicle their work on a project and make a portfolio to show prospective clients

Tons of possibilities for marketers:

• Photographers - make a portfolio book
• Graphic designers - make a book of all the logos you've done
• Restaurant owners - make a cookbook
• Non-profits - build an album from your latest fund raising event

More ideas at the Blurb Books website

Welcome Email Ideas

Spotted this "welcome email" design from MailChimp user RealTruck.com

It's a nice idea that's not too hard to implement: when people subscribe to the RealTruck email newsletter, the welcome email contains a $10 off promo code:

How many of you actually took the time to customize your own welcome emails this way?

Do your welcome emails have nice gifts like this for your new subscribers, or do you just have the boilerplate, "welcome, this is the info we have on file, and click here to unsubscribe in the future, blah blah blah."

When I saw this welcome email, I got a little self-conscious of my own welcome emails for our MonkeyWrench newsletter. I went back to look at what I did, and boy was I embarrassed...

Here's what my own welcome email looked like:

Yaaaawn.

I guess I was more excited about customizing my beautiful HTML email templates and signup forms, so the poor little welcome email got no love.

I used the example from Realtrucks as my inspiration, plus these ideas from Mark Brownlow to totally redesign my welcome email (click for full screen):

The main thing I added (besides some color!) was a link to past issues of our newsletter. MailChimp makes that really easy (details here). 

Then I got to thinking - one reason I kept my welcome email so plain (besides laziness and stupidity) is I thought that cramming too many images and links into a "transactional" email would get it blocked by more spam filters.

So I ran my welcome email through our Inbox Inspector tool. It made it through every single spam filter, except---you guessed it---Postini. Postini said that it looked like "make money fast" spam. Here's my spam filter report:

Hmm, Postini thinks this is "make money fast spam"? I looked at my copy and noticed this line:

Maybe that is a little too spammy.

I removed that line, ran another Inbox Inspection, and it passed Postini!

I never would have known about Postini, let alone been able to get past it, without the Inbox Inspector. Unless, of course, I purchased my own Postini server for email testing. Big, big thank you to the geniuses at ReturnPath for coming up with this technology.

Do your welcome emails need some love? Are you missing out on the best opportunity to make a great first impression with your new subscribers? Do you know if your transactional emails make it past spam filters?

Event Marketing via Email

Interesting article from Karen Gedney on how she used email marketing to do some last-minute event promotion:

Recently, I was called to rescue an event that was only two months away -- with only a handful of registrants to date. Here's what I did.

Nice use of surveys in the article. Great tips for any event planners out there.

http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625860

Ruby on Rails integration with MailChimp

The folks at ProjectLocker.com have created a way to integrate MailChimp with Ruby on Rails applications. It's open source, and posted at:

http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-mailchimp/

They've even got it checking an inbox for MailChimp's automated "This user has just subscribed/unsubscribed" email alerts, so they can take appropriate actions on their own hosted database.

Thanks, ProjectLocker!

Background Images in HTML email

One of our customers recently designed a really nice email campaign that had a blue background, with white "title" text on top.

Here's a snippet of their design in Gmail:

Beautiful.

Even works in Outlook 2007:

But here it is in AOL 9:

Here's what went wrong...

For the title (MAKEUP LOOK OF THE WEEK!), they used an image composed of white text, and a transparent background. Besides the problem of "images turned off by default," this is risky because it depends on a dark background actually working, and showing through. And in HTML email, you can't really depend on anything working properly.

For the blue background, they used a tiling background file. Background images don't always work in HTML email. Furthermore, they specified the background image in their embedded CSS:

#content { background: url("images/email_bg.jpg") bottom left repeat-x; }

Embedded CSS is not very trustworthy anymore, especially in webmail clients (inline CSS is safest now).

To make matters worse, the url they used for the background image didn't use an absolute path, pointing to the file on their server.

Instead of:

url("images/email_bg.jpg")

It should've been:

url("http://www.myserver.com/images/email_bg.jpg")

So even if the embedded CSS worked, the image still wouldn't have been downloaded.

Fortunately, they designed the email to degrade gracefully, by assigning a solid blue bgcolor to their table:

<table id="content" bgcolor="#79C0F6" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0">

Unfortunately, AOL 9 didn't accept the blue bgcolor, because the CSS (id=content), with the broken image path, appears to be overriding it.

By the way, same thing broke in Mail.com, Hotmail, Comcast, Outlook 2003, Outlook Express, Yahoo, Thunderbird, and on and on. In fact, according to their Inbox Inspector report, the blue bgcolor only worked in Gmail, Outlook 2007, and---get this---Lotus Notes.

We re-ran the report after fixing the absolute path, and it rendered properly in all the email programs. If the background-image wasn't accepted (as with Outlook 2007), the bgcolor was properly swapped out.

Forward-to-friend Forms: Can I save the friends' emails?

Got this question the other day:

"Dear MailChimp,
My site has a forward-to-friend link. If I save the friends' email addresses and contact them later, would that be spam?"

Short answer: Yes, that would be spam. More importantly, it would be rude.

Long answer:

Refer-a-friend (aka tell-a-friend, and forward-to-friend) tools are touchy. I'd be concerned about a few things.

1. Storing all those friends' emails is a pretty huge privacy faux pas (unless you actually post a statement that explains "we'll be saving your friends' email addresses, and we'll also be contacting them later"). Of course, nobody would ever submit their friends' email if they saw that. Which, I guess, is the point. They're probably trusting you to keep that stuff private. Actually, they're probably expecting you to never even save their friends' emails in the first place.

2. If you emailed that list of friends en masse, it's spam. If you emailed them personal notes, one at a time, from your own computer, it's probably not spam.

See:
http://www.spamhaus.org/definition.html

but...

3. Even if you emailed those people one at a time to get around the technical definition of spam, good luck gaining trust from those people after they realized you got their emails from a refer-a-friend form. And even if it's not technically spam, when people receive emails from people they don't know, they report it as spam to their ISPs anyway. You could get blacklisted fast by doing this. I doubt any blacklist administrator would be very forgiving of anyone collecting emails from a forward to friend form.

4. If one of those friends you contact rats on you, you'll lose the trust of the original friend too.

What you should do instead:

When someone tells their friend about your web page, do you include something in the email you send, asking that friend to opt-in "for more great content like this"? That's really about as far as you can go with refer-a-friend tools. Make the email that gets forwarded to the friend as trustworthy as possible/

On your forward-to-friend form, always require the referrer's name and email address, so you have proof that this message was a "casual" forward, and that you weren't paying people to forward emails to their friends (you can get into legal trouble if it looks like you're paying people to submit these forms to their friends). You should also do your best to make sure the forwarding tool can't be grossly abused, or you could be accused of "looking the other way" and allowing spam to be sent from your system.

Other resources:

Here's what the ASA in London says about refer-a-friend forms, and privacy

Here's the pledge that all ESPC members must make (Read the very last paragraph in the PDF concerning FTF forms).

Perhaps the best place to look are the companies that actually specialize in refer-a-friend tools.

For instance, almost every page on CNN.com has a link that lets you forward it to a friend. They use a vendor called Clickability for that service. Clickability makes it clear on their form they're not going to contact your friend:

If you read their privacy policy you learn that they do collect your activities and preferences (such as which pages you found interesting enough to send or save), and then provide that to their clients (such as CNN), and perhaps use the information to target banner ads. No mention of contacting the friends you forward to. Their features list indicates that they only report aggregate information about forwards, no personal friends' email addresses. My guess is they've been doing this since 1999, and have some pretty huge clients, so they've probably done the legal due diligence on this issue. If they don't think they can get away with it, why would you?

Recommendations:

Our recommendation is: don't do it. If you've got content that's actually interesting enough for a friend to refer another friend, you're already ahead of the curve. Keep posting great content, and add a newsletter opt-in link (in a non-annoying way) inside all the emails sent to those friends, so that they'll give you permission to contact them. If those friends go through the trouble of opting-in, you'll know they truly want to hear from you, and your response rate will be much better. Go through great lengths to protect your users' privacy, and post information about it. That'll actually help your reputation, as opposed to destroying it by contacting people who don't know you.

By the way, MailChimp comes with a built-in forward-to-friend link in all the emails you send. Just add the *|FORWARD|* tag to your campaigns, and we'll insert the link for you:

We never store any of the email addresses used to forward emails. We do provide our users with aggregate information in their campaign reports:

Spamtraps and Hamtraps

Al Iverson did a pretty interesting study on which blacklists work well, and which ones accidentally trapped legit email. He setup "spamtraps" and "hamtraps" (learned a new word) and compiled all his results:

http://www.dnsbl.com/2007/03/how-well-do-various-blacklists-work.html

New Twist on Nigerian Spam

New twist on Nigerian spam. Siiiiigh. People are falling for this stuff?

All new computers should come with a boot-up screen (with a followup quiz) to teach newbies the basics. This woulda saved me a lot of embarrassment when I first got on "the Internets:"

1. If someone sends you an email with a really cool, amazing fact, it's a lie.
2. If someone sends you an email asking you to "forward this to 10 friends" don't do it. It's a lie, and your friends will secretly hate you.
3. Don't download anything. It's got a virus in it.
4. Don't give your email address to just anybody.
5. Unless you are a king or prince from some far off land, there is no reason a king or prince from some far off land would be contacting you to transfer his money to your bank account.
6. If a woman starts chatting with you online, that's really a man. A dirty, dirty man.
7. That really funny joke or web page you'd like to share with all your new online friends? Don't do it. We already read it 5 years ago. Wait 5 years before forwarding any jokes or URLs to friends.

Ideas for Restaurant Email Marketing

Here's a nice case study for all you restaurant owners from Bennigans.

Interesting bits:

"they took a risk on their profit margins and pitched two entrees for the price of one in a four-day-only offer. They also mentioned appetizers and desserts in the copy"

"Although Bennigan’s higher-ups were skittish about the margins in giving away a meal for every paid one, their fears were definitely quelled by the sheer volume of customers and cross-menu activity. Overall sales were up 12%. More particularly, beverage sales increased 12.7%, appetizers 7% and desserts 10.8%. In fact, some restaurants ran out of certain menu items."

And I don't remember how I ever stumbled upon these guys, but Quantified Marketing Group has a nice email newsletter with lots of tips for restaurants. I've never wanted to own a restaurant, but I'm subscribed to their newsletter, and find it fascinating. They cover stuff like how to price your pasta dishes, cost segregation analysis, designing your restaurant, and how to find good restaurant accounting software. Here's a link to some of their past issues.

Obscure HTML Email CSS Quirk in IE7

A couple of customers contacted us with some mysterious HTML email problems we'd never seen before. The tables in their emails were somehow blowing out (way out) when viewed in IE7 (which would happen if they were checking their email account at Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etc).

Let's say you've placed some inline-CSS on a table cell. You want to give the cell a top border of 1 pixel, and the border should have a HEX color value of #333333 (very dark gray). Your code would look something like:

style="border-top: 1px solid #333333;"

Now let's say you accidentally forgot the pound (#) symbol in that HEX value.

In most browsers, it's a gimme. Nothing bad happens.

But somehow, IE7 thinks the color value is your border width, and gives you a top border of 333333px (actually, it's more like 960 pixels, but you get the gist). It's just coming up with some very large number from that 333333. If you used "333" instead, the border would be exactly 333 pixels. If you enter 33, it's 33 pixels. 333333 for some reason makes it 960 pixels.

Here are a couple sample files you can open in IE7 to see what we mean:

With the # symbol in CSS

Without the # symbol in CSS

If this post didn't put you to sleep, you might also like:

HTML Email Tips for Web Designers

and more free email design and coding resources in the

MailChimp Email Marketing Resource Center

Getting Blocked By Postini?

Some of our customers who have been checking their email campaigns in our Inbox Inspector  are noticing that Postini is a very, very tough email firewall to get through. Just about everybody (including us!) is getting rejected by Postini.

Dozens of our customers have been testing their campaigns, but so far, we've only seen about 8 campaigns actually get through Postini. Ouch!

You may recall I spent hours dueling with Postini with this GourmetStation campaign. I changed keywords, altered the HTML, totally changed the subject line---all to no avail (at least I made a pretty fascinating image-to-text discovery).

Postini is very picky. Smart---but picky.

All I can say is that if you're having trouble getting through Postini's firewall, below are screenshots of some campaigns that actually passed. Maybe you'll see some kind of pattern here...

The only general similarity I can see with all these campaigns is their image-to-weight ratio.

If they have lots of images, they need a lot more text to balance things out. If a campaign has very little text, then it better not have a lot of images. Also, these people are experienced (maybe a little obsessed) with coding clean HTML (or they simply used our built-in HTML email templates).

Big thanks to all these MailChimp customers for letting us learn from their campaigns...

RealTruck.com Mother's Day Campaign
What's surprising to me about this one from RealTruck.com is it actually contains lots of those "spammy" keywords that we've all been trained to avoid. They used words like NEW, and You Save. They also use red text, and have dollar signs galore. But they got a 100% pass for their Spam Filter score. Goes to show the spam filters are a lot smarter than you think, and the old advice of "Avoid spammy words" just doesn't always work. So long as you're sending good, useful email that people actually requested, you don't have to stress over every little keyword in your campaign.

SoupStudios.com Mother's Day Campaign
Here's one from Aarron Walter, designed for Soup Studios. This is a campaign that doesn't have a lot of text in it, so you'd think the spam filters would give him some grief. Aarron's a web developer, and his code is spotless. That probably helped a lot (certainly didn't hurt him!). Also, the image is well optimized at 40k.  Aarron knows what he's doing, and somehow, I think Postini picked up on that.

Robb Report Home Entertainment eNews
This one from Robb Report has 4 big images in it, but it's also got a lot of text in it to balance them out. Plus, the text is quality content. Product reviews with no apparent "CLICK HERE NOW!" keywords. Note: I spoke with their designer, and she apparently spends a lot of time making sure their HTML code is immaculate before copy-pasting into MailChimp.

Caitlin Allen Acupuncture
I get a lot of "pharmaceutical" spam, so if you were to tell me an email campaign with, "Chinese medicine, Chinese herbs, hayfever, rhinitis, pilates, bloating, and probiotics" could ever pass through spam filters, I'd ask you what kind of crack you were smoking. But Caitlin Allen Acupuncture sent this nice, well-written newsletter to their customers, with ALL those pharmaceutical keywords (and more) and got a 100% passing score. The spam filters (including Postini) could tell that this was good, useful content, so they didn't block it.

LBC Wise Counsel
This one's from Oomph Design, on behalf of their client, LBC Wise Counsel. I like this one for several reasons. First, they passed Postini. Second, they used one of our built-in templates. Third, it starts with a good re-introduction paragraph at the top ("I'm sure you remember me from...").

King Innovation
This one has at least 7 images in it, but again, they're balanced with a lot of text. Also, their HTML code is rock solid (we know, because they used our built-in template to make this). Yet another example of how you can't just assume spammy keywords will get you blocked. This campaign has ALL CAPS, exclamation points, an iPod giveaway, and all kinds of stuff you'd normally think spam filters would hate. But somehow, the spam filters (including Postini) know it's legit.

So I have no idea what the deal is with Postini. It's very picky. The only common thread here is immaculate code, plus a good image-weight to text ratio.

Should You Care?
Is it worth spending a lot of your time trying to get through Postini? Depends on whether or not a significant portion of your recipients check their mail through a Postini server. One way you can tell is to open an old campaign's stats, and dig into your bounce records (how to do that in MailChimp). Just eyeball your SMTP headers for any signs that a Postini server rejected you. Here's an old article I found with an example Postini bounce. Or just CTRL+F and search the smtp headers for "postini."

According to Postini, they're used by over 35,000 businesses. They seem to be used by medium to large corporations, and ISPs can become Postini resellers (they use it to offer anti-spam services to their customers). Check out their "Clients" page to get an idea of who uses them, and whether or not your list might consist of similar clients.

Image Based Spam and Other Design Mistakes

Just stumbled upon this old article at the IronPort site, explaining image-based spam. I think we all know the basics. Spam filters scan for text, images don't have text, yadda yadda. But...

"Actually, it's a little more complicated than that. Some spam filters grew clever enough to spot simple types of image spam. At that point, spammers came up with a fiendishly clever trick. They learned how to use a layer of text on top of a layer of a randomly generated background for each message."

Other interesting tidbits about where it all came from, pump and dump stock scams, and more at:

http://www.ironport.com/company/pp_webhosting_news_11-29-2006.html

We've seen a lot of experienced web designers actually send HTML emails that are nothing but one giant image. That's an easy way of getting your campaign mistaken as image-based spam. We've posted a few other very, very common mistakes that we see web designers and creatives making all the time with their email campaigns:

Common Email Design Mistakes

Is Your Own Domain Name Getting You Blocked?

Someone called me the other day, and told me that he'd been sending email newsletters to his customer list for years. He was using some cheap software he installed on his desktop. He admitted that he hadn't been properly cleaning the list, managing bounces, handling unsubs promptly, etc. Long story short, he got himself blacklisted.

He thought he could solve all his problems if he switched to MailChimp, because we apparently have a good reputation, and because he thought we had some kind of secret-handshake arrangement with ISPs (actually, that's not the case---they'll blacklist anybody that generates too many spam complaints).

Ok, let's forget about the fact that he's been blacklisted, so he wants to potentially get us blacklisted too (um, why would we want you as a customer now?).

What this guy didn't realize is nowadays, if you've been blacklisted, switching email servers won't necessarily solve your problem.

Most people know that if you send spam, your email server's IP address will soon end up on a blacklist.

You probably also know that if your server is in the same "neighborhood" (IP range) as another server that sends spam (like in a shared environment at your ISP), then your server could get blacklisted too.

But not a lot of people know that your domain name can get blacklisted. If that happens, it doesn't matter where you send your email from. If spam filters simply find your domain name in the email's content, the message will get blocked.

The idea is that if you're an evil spammer (or just a really sloppy company), and you pay affiliates to go out and spam on your behalf, your company's name and reputation can get tarnished right along with theirs.

They call it "spamvertising," and you do not want to be labeled as a "spamvertiser." You'll end up on a "URI Blacklist" or "URI Block."

You can check if your company's domain name is blacklisted at:

http://lookup.uribl.com/

If you have an affiliate program at your company, this should be a concern (along with making sure your affiliates are CAN-SPAM compliant). Here are some tips for monitoring your affiliates, and here's a case where the FTC sued a company for letting its affiliates violate CAN-SPAM.

It's an interesting topic.

MailChimp was once put on a blacklist for this very reason. Not because of affiliates, or spam. But because our list-manage.com domain name, used for handling double opt-ins and unsubscribes for all our customers, is found in millions of emails sent every single day. When we first introduced our list management features (and bought that domain name), it looked very suspicious to all the spam filters out there that suddenly, this one domain name was found in so many emails across their network. They thought we were a spamvertiser.

Luckily, they do a little research on domains before they block them. Un-luckily, our domain name was brand-spanking new, so it had no history whatsoever. Took us a while to get off those lists. Now that the domain has a long (and good) history, we don't have that problem anymore.

Spammers are actually trying to fool spam filters who look for "spamvertising" domains by embedding tons of legitimate domains into their spam. The idea is to flood spam filters with false positives, rendering them useless. Or, instead of embedding their own links, they disguise them by using free "redirect" services (like tinyURL) in their spam.

Naturally, spam filters are responding to that by actually following every single link in your email, so they can get to the final destination domain and block it (Barracuda's firewall just introduced this feature).

It's neat when you think about it. Until you realize that when spam filters follow every link in your email, they will inevitably follow your unsubscribe link too. We've had a few recent cases of people mysteriously getting unsubscribed from lists, and we think we know why.

Hopefully, spam filters and email firewalls will start using "URI Whitelists" so that they don't follow certain (trusted/registered) links. Then of course, spammers will find some way to ruin that too.

Round and round we go...

Internet Retailer Survey: Email Marketing Benchmarks

Our friend Donna sends us this link to the InternetRetailer Survey. If you're an online retail business that does any email marketing, there are some interesting stats in the survey:

• Only 59.3% of respondents have acceptable e-mail delivery rates.
• Only 24.2% of web merchants have an e-mail open rate greater than 25%
• Only 17.1% reported e-mail click-through rates of 15.1% or more while 51.8% report click-through rates of 2.51% to 15%
• 60% conduct between one and three campaigns each month

Here are some of our own tips:

• First, we've got some email marketing benchmarks that you can reference as well.
• If you want to know what your successful email delivery rate is, the only way to tell is to sign up for as many ISPs as you possibly can, and send yourself tests. Or, sign up for something like DeliveryMonitor.com.
• Don't know your actual conversion rates? You can use 3rd party conversion trackers in your email campaigns (and websites).  Check out ConversionRuler.com

MailChimp Customer Showcase: Mad Rollin' Dolls

We could showcase some of the large, well-known corporations who use MailChimp. But where's the fun in that? We'd rather show off some of the cool, hip, offbeat, wacky customers who use MailChimp, and maybe send some traffic their way...

The Mad Rollin' Dolls is "Madison Wisconsin's one-and-only all-girls         flat-track roller derby league." I'd certainly pay to watch teams like The Reservoir Dolls and Vaudeville Vixens duke it out in the 'ring. You know, for charity. They donate a portion of their proceeds to charities like "Mustaches for Kids."

Check out some of the cool merchandise in their online store. Send that kick-ass girl friend of yours (or your tough-as-nails mom) a kick-ass roller-derby t-shirt.

Email Deliverability Tips from Microsoft

Microsoft has posted a handy guide for improving your deliverability to Hotmail, Windows Live Mail, and Outlook.

Download the 26-page PDF here.

Interesting stuff about their built-in SmartScreen technology (which just made the news here), used to detect spam and phishing scams. Also, how they use Brightmail (basically a spam filter for spam filters), and they recommend using ReturnPath's SenderScore service.

They even have some handy tips for designing HTML email for Outlook 2007, like:

• Keep your designs less than 600 pixels wide
• Only use inline CSS
• No background images
• No JavaScript

And other stuff we've always recommended. In fact, all their design suggestions are already included in MailChimp's built-in templates (just in case you haven't found a reason to give them a try yet).

Source: http://www.b2bemailmarketing.com 

How selling email sponsorships can land you on blacklists

One of our customers recently sent a campaign to 20,000 recipients. Those recipients all opted-in at his website for special alerts. They even had to click a confirmation link in a welcome email.

Problem is, 63 of his recipients still reported his campaign as spam.

That means everyone here at MailChimp got 63 warnings from ISPs (we send FBL reports to our entire staff, so we each feel the urgency if one of our customers is generating complaints).

We suspended his account to investigate...

He runs a tight ship, in terms of list management. He sends a well-branded welcome email. He's got his unsub link, mailing address, and all the usual CAN-SPAM requirements. He's even got some text in his footer, reminding people how they got on his list.

Hmm. What would cause 63 double opt-in recipients to still report you as a spammer, and possibly get you blacklisted?

Turns out he radically changed the design of his email campaign. He went from a white background with a blue and orange logo, to a very anonymous looking, almost non-branded, black-background template with white text and red links.

Why on earth would he dramatically change the branding and identity of his email campaign? Turns out he had a big sponsor in that email, and that sponsor's branding is black and red. The sponsor demanded that he redesign his campaign to match their branding. As you can imagine, his recipients just didn't recognize who was sending, and they reported it as spam.

We've seen this happen before, actually.

It's very common with promoters, party planners, publicists, and the like.

They're popular, they're cool, they're uber-networkers, and they have huge lists of local people who want to be "in the know." They send them occasional emails about cool events going on around town. Kind of like tiny, ultra-focused DailyCandys. They usually have extremely loyal lists. Very valuable lists. They make good money from sponsorships and ads.

The smart ones always, always, always put their own branding at the top of the email template. Then, just below, they place their their sponsor's branding and details. By the way, MailChimp's "Postcard" layout is perfect for this (here's an example we like).

If you want to sell sponsorships or ads in your emails, never let a sponsor supersede your own branding. Always let your recipients know where the email came from. Even better, try to include a personal note from you, or your company, introducing your sponsor below.

For example, "Hi everybody, we've got a special offer from Acme Widgets to all our subscribers. Enjoy..."

This will keep the unsubscribes (and the spam complaints!) to a minimum.

Whose list is it, anyway?

DKIM Authentication Icon in YahooMail Beta

For the longest time, ISPs like Yahoo! and Hotmail have talked about how they'd be checking emails for authentication, then using little tiny icons to signify whether or not certain emails were "trustworthy."

I'll admit, even though we've setup a few clients on DKIM and SenderID, we've yet to see any signs of those little icons. Sure, authentication has helped one of our MailChimp customers get through that mysterious "Bellsouth is blocking all HTML emails!" issue a while ago, but where's that icon?

I just found it. I thought it would be in my inbox list pane (where it would be really helpful), but it actually shows up after you've already opened the email. Here it is for Andy Borowitz' email, when viewed in Yahoo (click on the thumbnail to the right to zoom in). I'd bet that when authentication gets more popular, ISPs will begin moving the little icon up into that inbox list, so you can use it to judge whether or not you should even open a message from somebody.

If you'd like to read more about how ISPs are using Authentication and Certification now, and how they plan to do it in the near future, here's a recap of the recent Authentication and Online Trust Alliance.

Are You On The Safelist?

I've been using Apple Mail (the free email program that came with my laptop). The main reason I love this program is its spotlight search feature. I don't have to worry so much about folders and sorting old emails. I just search, and it'll find emails from years ago, no matter how obscure.

Anyways, the spam filter isn't as powerful as I'd like in Apple Mail. So I downloaded an add-on called SpamSieve. It requires a little training (you have to teach it what's spam and what isn't), but now it's been great.

I just noticed something in SpamSieve's "Preferences" area: they use the Habeas Safelist. Are you on the safelist? Know how to get on it? Is it worth it? Are there other safe lists out there that you should be on? Which ISPs and spam filters use which lists? Learn more about Habeas and email certification here.