Essential Guide to E-mail Marketing - Haymarket

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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.”
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Page 1 and 2: SPAM TODAY: AOL’s postmaster Char
Page 3: Editor’s Note As savvy marketers
Page 7 and 8: Over 12 Million Email Addresses of
Page 10: 10 FEATURE DM News • E-Mail Marke
Page 13 and 14: WKICorpAd07DMNSup 9/18/07 12:15 PM
Page 15 and 16: The Email Marketing Superhighway Gr
Page 18 and 19: 18 FUNDAMENTALS DM News • E-Mail
Page 24 and 25: 24 INFRASTRUCTURE DM News • E-Mai
Page 26 and 27: I’M NOT SAYING REACHING ME ONLINE
Page 28 and 29: Reach the online audience you’ve
Page 30 and 31: So, you’ve been executing email c
Page 32 and 33: C M Y CM MY CY CMY K dmnews_abandon
Page 34 and 35: 34 ANALYTICS DM News • E-Mail Mar
Page 36 and 37: Measuring e-mail results: Using the
Page 38 and 39: E-MAIL CAMPAIGNS Page 39 The elemen
Page 40 and 41: conform to your brand and culture.
Page 42 and 43: Michael Stebbin MarketMotive Random
Page 44 and 45: Which audience is yours? If you kee
Page 47: Email blast is a thing of the past

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