Essential Guide to E-mail Marketing - Haymarket

04 FEATURE DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007
Q&A
A conversation with AOL’s Charles Stiles
BY DIANNA DILWORTH
Spam is a never-ending problem. Overall spam levels in
August 2007 increased to an average of 69% of total email,
according to the September issue of Symantec’s
monthly spam report. It seems that no sooner does a
spam-blocking firm or ISP identify and stop a spam phenomenon
than a new one pops up. DM News spoke with AOL postmaster
Charles Stiles about the state of spam today, the lingering
challenges and what this means to legitimate e-mail marketers.
DM News: What are the biggest spam problems you’ve seen in
recent months and what are you doing to track them?
Charles Stiles: As of late, we are seeing a lot more criminal-type
behavior. The flavor of the day right now is people taking advantage
of individuals’ home computers. They are using botnets, which take
over home computers to send out spam. There is that type of activity,
and then there is registering fraudulent accounts, and that’s really
what it comes down to. It’s no longer legitimate marketers using bad
practices. It’s really about criminal activity now.
DM News: How do you deal with this huge problem of botnets,
especially when sometimes one can fall onto a computer and only
be active for an hour before erasing itself?
CS: One of the things that we do is we try and figure out how
these machines are connecting to us. Typically they are coming
through and sending stuff out on Port 25, that’s the standard mail
port. So AOL doesn’t use the same standard mail port. Instead we
require people to authenticate. You can’t just send e-mail off of our
mail servers when you are connected. You have to actually provide
a user name and password. Now with our clients, it’s done in the
background, you don’t see it, and with Outlook or other thirdparty
clients, you can configure it. But we do require user name
“
Charles Stiles, Postmaster, AOL
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
and password so that not just anybody can connect.
We also track how much mail each account is sending, whether
you are using our client or whether you are using a third-party
mail client. This is not so much to make sure that you don’t send
too much mail, but we look at your pattern of sending. If you
only sent five or 10 messages a day on average and suddenly you
just sent out 500, that’s certainly outside of your normal pattern —
very similar to what a credit card issuer might do — in which
case we would challenge you. And we wouldn’t necessarily just
block you, but we would offer you a challenge to say, “Is this a
real human behind this? Is she sending us a message and this is
just outside of her norm?”
We would also use what you call a capture test or the image challenge
test. So long as you passed it, you are fine to go ahead and
continue sending. If you don’t, then we will probably scramble your
password and say OK, we’re just not going to allow you to connect
to the servers anymore. Then there’s an online process whereby you
can get it unscrambled, but you again have to pass that capture test,
just to make sure that it is a human that is behind the keyboard.
DM News: So how are spammers getting more sophisticated, and
what is going on with image spam?
CS: Spammers have started using images as opposed to just text on
a lot of these messages, because they have found that the text is easily
deciphered by most of our filters and engines. So instead they’ll
put together a picture that contains all the text that they would
need for their spam message. But because sending the same picture
over and over would be easily detected, they change it and put
static in it or additional elements so that it is very difficult to track.
DM News: And what are some of the things that you are doing to
track image spam? Is it also part of the authentication and login
process?
Even if a marketer did have express written consent from the consumer, if they
had copies of his driver’s license, knew his address, his telephone number,
blood type, if at the end of the day, the consumer says,‘I don’t want it,’ then we
want the mailer to stop mailing it to them.”