How Spammers Destroyed Reliable Email Deliverability

Lo, it reemerged a few days ago, along with a huge rise in spam reports. According to some experts quoted by Krebs, the web hosting firm McColo "hosted machines that controlled the flow of 75 percent of the world's spam." Is that possible? Can one company be responsible for so much spam? The Washington Post followed up on this question with this aptly named article: How Does So Much Spam Come From One Place?

Hormel Foods' SPiced hAM notwithstanding, it's pretty hilarious that Monty Python's skit is responsible for the origin of the name. The relentless Viking call: "Spam, Spam, Spam" that drones on to drown all communication. But after this bit of odd hilarity, there's nothing funny about spam.

Thanks to spam and the spamming spammers who send garbage along with phishing expeditions, en masse to lists from infected computers everywhere, no one is laughing. But it's not just the annoyance of spam in my inbox, which is bad enough. I'd love to lock up these greedy, abusive, email gangsters for the stunt of destroying one of the greatest marketing vehicles known to man.

Short of that: I'll just rant here about it instead.

Spammers created gigantic reliability hurdles. Imagine, in the U.S., something like 80 percent of the workforce has email. People are opening, reading, wanting more, and we can deliver it with segmented, personalized information. Only, when we do our customers consider it like a strange brown wrapped package that arrived by snail mail during the anthrax scare.

How endemic is spam? The problem is so bad that when researching stats, the reports talk about averages per second and totals from the past 24 hours per country, and the totals are still in the millions, with leading categories of messages reported, like medications versus porn. These numbers are hard to verify, as they come in from various watchdog organizations and email clients who track such things, but taken as a whole it's informative. The message is this: even if we could kill the email scourge of firms like McColo, the imprint will loom large on people's experience of junk email.

The question for me: what can we do to help raise the reputation of email as a legitimate marketing vehicle? For one thing, we can support improved technology, regulation and best practices in areas like filters, identity authentication systems, tracking reputations of ISPs, feedback from postmaster pages, watch groups and so forth. These all compliment our efforts, accounting for far better success rates and deliverability in general.

As individuals, one powerful, real weapon to fight spam is simple, thoughtful transparency. Given the holiday season and spirit, I didn't want to rant without offering some ideas for giving. So here are some ways to implement transparency practices in your email marketing campaigns.

• Make sure all the CAN SPAM basics are accounted for and truly easy to follow for such things as unsubscribing. Likewise, make your from name in the email something easily recognizable and be sure the subject line is attractive while not misleading. It's also helpful to include a signature with contact information, so each email is from an individual who can be reached.

• Provide explicit explanation of your permissions and privacy policies. If you plan to use your customer's email for list rental, just say so. Be cautious not to misinform your audience, nor misrepresent information hiding as advertising or name captures for sponsors.

• Generally communicate with your audience in a manner that's direct, honest, and easy to read without heavy PR or marketing and jargon. This issue is more prevalent in industries clouded by misinformation, such as financial planning and investing, insurance, manufacturing, or many business to business sellers. In this case you have the specter of email and the industry to contend with in reaching your audience.

• Ask for feedback from your customers on their experiences of your service or products, then share these experiences - the good, the bad, and the ugly - with your customer base. Here's the big Q: do you want to just sell something, or do you want to engage your audience in a conversation? Now you can be hailed for understanding the community connection with Web 2.0 sensibility.