If you’re on FaceBook, you’ve probably noticed the application SuperPoke. Well, I’ve been superpoke’d-spammed for a while now. Other members can send you a superpoke, and you get notified by email each time. I tried to disable the email notifications a few months ago, but it didn’t work. I tried to block that specific user- didn’t work. Today, I got a new SuperPoke from a new person and before it snowballed, decided to tackle this issue.

The email SuperPoke (owned by Slide.com) sends looks like this, with a link to “change settings”.

That’s straightforward enough. So I finally decide to go back to Facebook and solve this problem. The “settings” page of the Slide.com and SuperPoke page looks like the following. When you put your cursor in the email field, it has a pop-up with the privacy issues.

Well, now I’m just confused. For one, why are they requesting my email again? I’m responding to an email they sent me. Second, it’s unclear if I’m adding the email to unsubscribe, as some settings pages do, or if it’s for signing up for more announcements (the last thing I want). I appreciate the small explanation pane, but it’s far from clear.

So, do I enter in my email, and click the box? Or just click the box? This reminds me of other issues Facebook (& applications on the platform) have had with email.

Cole Hardware, a local hardware chain that competes in San Francisco pretty seriously with Home Depot, which has a store in a city to the south, has some astounding customer retention and acquisition techniques.

I visited the store recently to get some paint for a project. An experienced contractor and building owner helped me pick out paint, select the best method of taping, gave me a quick lesson on some new advancements in painting, and recommended a primer and liquid sander.

At checkout, they:
- asked for my email address for their newsletters (bingo!)
- gave me a small key-chain-sized member card
- gave me $5 off my next visit (whether or not I have the card with me)
- gave me 2 free woven carryall bags (SF has a no-plastic-bag law)

Then, in the mail a week later, a hand-written note by someone at Cole welcoming me to their store.

Home Depot- didn’t have the brand I wanted, and, during my entire visit, as I wandering around their curtains section, paint section, and home decorating area, never once was I approached by a salesperson. Needless to say, I didn’t buy anything. Never heard from them again.

Nicely played, Cole!

I’ve gotten a few email-marketing related questions recently and thought I’d share it with the wider audience, in a way to just say, no you’re not alone, other people struggle!

Anna,
We have a list of 2,000 email addresses that we’d love to start sending regular newsletters and promotional emails. How do we get started?
Small Biz Owner

Hi Small Biz!
There are a bunch of email service providers oriented towards smaller businesses, and that lend them a whole lot of features that small businesses wouldn’t normally be able to afford. So check out Emma Marketing, MailChimp, and Constant Contact. I recommend you stay with their template as testing and re-designing involve a very comprehensive testing suite that you probably won’t be able to setup and execute, but their templates have already passed the test.

One important thing is to setup a campaign calendar and make sure not to bombard your list right away. You will also experience unsubscriptions, so make sure that you’re ready for that. In your first communication, be sure to identify your company and where you received the email address from- as your audience has never received promotional email from your co. before. Other than that- good luck!

Anna,
We send attached PDF newsletters to our audience because they have concerns about security. Is this the right thing to do? How do other community organizations send their newsletters on a shoestring?
Anna’s gym

The security issues with HTML are largely false. If you’re not putting viruses in your emails, then it’s not happening- what is concerning is that you are requiring your audience a one-click step away from viewing the newsletter!

Studies have shown you get less opens and reads when you introduce a clicking step, so you’ll lose part of your audience by putting all of the content in a third party app. The solution, yes, is to create your newsletter in a newsletter template and offer your audience both HTML and text, a format that any email service provider understands. The “text-only” version is detected by the email account if it cannot render HTML (very rare). You can also include a link to the PDF version as you do now, so that members in the audience that prefer Adobe Acrobat Viewer can still see it in that. To create an HTML template, I’d leverage the already created templates at your email provider, or reference the many articles out there on HTML writing for email- it’s a different beast entirely, very scaled down. It’s challenge, but you’ll be rewarded by the increased readership and engagement.

HTML newsletter template resources:
Free Email Newsletter Templates from MailChimp
HTML Email Guide
Principles of Beautiful HTML Emails
30 Free HTML Newsletters

Great test & article by Ron on Email Marketer’s Club, Tamara Gielen’s community for Email Experts (join!).

He did some tests on whether encoding- including the image source in an email using base 64- would avoid the image blocking of popular email clients. The result? They are still blocked.

I’ve heard this solution for years now, on various comments on blogs. I’ve never recommended it. I have an unproven suspicion report from Ron, below in the comments, that it increases the file size, which sets off all of these spam alarm flags, and makes it inconvenient for your subscriber base. I also don’t recommend crafty technical tricks to avoid spam filters.

There’s been a lot of posts on social networks- as well as a general anxiety by email marketers that their specialty, email, is dying. Well, to me it’s “same ole, same ole”- don’t worry about social networks, but that’s not an excuse to ignore them.

For anyone in online marketing nowadays, it’s very important to understand the usefulness of social networks. Since 1997, I’ve seen the job listing, “Community Manager,” and it’s up there with “web strategist” in my lexicon of titles that mean nothing. But now in the bevy of social networks, you actually may need someone to represent your company on all of those sites, and field comments, and generally … gasp… manage the community. Maybe you don’t, but you could also hire an affiliate marketer who is very savvy with social networks, or part-time blogger who can do some email copywriting. You need to understand the different channels and tools in the online marketer doctor’s bag of tricks.

Is it going to take over? Where does that anxiety come from? The feeling that some new channel is out there, and it’s going to monopolize the online time of our customer- away from clicking on our emails and buying stuff? I’d worry about that as soon as Facebook- as a kind of Granddaddy social app- figures out how to make money. Until then, I see it all as “same ole, same ole.”

For many of these sites- like Twitter- they are wrangling with issues emailers have had all along, essentially, a lot of live data with real-time requirements. Is Twitter, as a one-to-many, viral design, much different than transactional emails for any large online system, such as Fantasy Basketball during live draft? Because it’s got a new name doesn’t mean it’s new.

Coming into these social networks with a background in email- and OLAP database design- I see a lot of growing pains, but I also understand that email, its nature, essentially, is fundamental to the success. Not just because email sends you their passwords, but more and more email accounts are being used as the online database for internet users- storing you core social relationships. That means that people will consider their Yahoo and Gmail as an online presence- a kind of virtual wallet or passport. Just saying those phrases reminds me of various startups that failed and succeeded, trying to get customers to trust the Internet. Oh well, that’s another post!

Funny post the other day about social marketing gone wrong- the impending doom of a medium because (gasp!) marketers have taken it over. Funny man Duncan Riley: Pending Sign of the Twitter Apocalypse.. It’s Being Talked About by Internet Marketers.

To me, John Reese is giving internet marketing a bad name, that of MLMs! Multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes are created by selling the ’starter kit’ instead of a real product. They’re self-referentially successful. This article, and his example, expressly says that his formula works, but you have to “add him.” Essentially, a Ponzi scheme.

Don’t blame the medium, though, or the industry of marketing. I’ve found Twitter to be a great profesisonal tool in the tiny niche of email marketing. I get to chat with other email marketers, mostly logistics on when they’re visiting town. Plurk, FriendFeed, Plaxo and LinkedIn- Facebook & Last.FM- on and on- they all serve different purposes.

The methods suggested by John Reese are *not recommended.* They’re right up there with buying email lists, sending untargeted bulk email promotions, and other bad email marketing practices. The social marketing I hold up as a poster child: target your specific clique or social demographic and join the social network, and provide something of use. Adding 1,000 followers - unqualified, just numbers-game players- will not help your business. (Unless your business is… a MLM!)

Good example of social marketing done right: creating a giveaway, finding folks who might be interested (targeted, opt-in list), and building a list of interested folks in your giveaway/product, etc. A DJ friend of mine did this recently on her newsletter- she gave away a mixed track on iTunes, and then I forwarded that download- those that like her, and like DJ music, will use social media networks to “follow” her on Twitter and join the cliquey community. Not to just increase her numbers for no point at all.

Note: To give him credit, John Reese has posted a rebuttal to the Inquisitr & Mashable posts. In reading it, though, I don’t see much defeating my claims that he’s advising creating a Twitter account to buffet his own account, which I see as the definition of MLM. Still, for a well-rounded read, check it out. Wake Up Call Web 2.0 Wouldn’t Exist Without Internet Marketers

A former colleague chatted me yesterday with this perplexing “deal”:

SalesForce is offering non-profits free licenses to their software. But we keep on running into issues with their “governors.”

That’s really great of SF to do- and explains an uptick in “do you do SalesForce?” emails that I’ve been getting. The downside is a serious throttling to list size. SalesForce “governors” control the amount of items in targeted lists, so you can only include very small mailings. Seemed like all of the downside of having a hosted solution with none of the upside. If your experience is different, please post here, my friend’s eager to have an alternative, or fix, to the solution.

The question came up of complex segmentation for small lists. What ESPs can handle it? We determined that manually building a statistical model and scoring it then uploading to ESPs and using the “score” to simple filter the lists, is probably the only real inexpensive solution for non-profits. Note: this is not for transactional, or triggered, messages, just promotional and newsletter-oriented emails.

The alternates I suggested to him: SugarCRM, StrongMail, and a few consultancies that could help him setup the database. He and I had worked on an Epiphany installation and the license for that was too expensive for his clients, so that was out. He wasn’t interested in a per-email pricing either.

Getting kind of addicted to LinkedIn’s Question & Answer area, and a couple of questions are around “why are my web2.0 emails considered spam.” I explored a little bit last post about why my email servers think Plurk invites are spam.

Invitational emails are that strange gray area of promotional and transactional- like “forward to a friend” functionality that some find spammy. Similar to “forward link” or “forward article” to a friend, many of these friends don’t appreciate their email being stored on NYTimes’ site forever, for example. Some sites explicitly say “we will not remember this email”- but otherwise it’s a little unclear, unless you read the fine print, exactly what a company will do with your friends’ emails.

That paragraph was to explain why precious Web2.0 emails are considered, at times, spammy. Another common reason: the site uses the source-friend’s email address in the “from”. This will set off problems with spam filters that look for a resolution between the From address and the real sender domain. If those don’t match up, it’s in the spam folder. So, don’t spoof the email to get automatically white-listed, it won’t work.

Use of “no-reply”- I don’t like this feature as it seems to take the position that the site can shoot out emails, but not handle any unsubscription/deletion requests, like it’s a one-directional firehose. I don’t know how SpamAssasin treats this, but I did notice the Plurk address was that way. What they should do is setup a simple unsubscription filter on the reply, like almost all GNU mailing list apps can handle, and a forward to customer service or some inbox that spits an autoresponder out “We got your email and we’re going to answer within X days,” with a list of helpful site link.

Plurk especially is missing out on a great opportunity to leverage the cutesy UI and design, by sending out these barebones text-only emails that aren’t even making it through spam filters (which really is the point of text-only transactional emails, in my mind.)

I know how these emails get built- been there!- an engineer (me) somewhere rolls out the new feature, “let’s let users invite friends by email!” and nobody checks the content of the email minus a cursory copywriter edit, and out it goes into production. Decisions like sender “real names,” domains, etc. are made on the fly by someone who can send themselves a message, so it must work! No monitoring on the systems, no ability to tell if the emails are going out, or how they’re being viewed. It’s a toughie, and not unique to any single system.

Update 6/14: I finally got one of my invites and it’s a simple text-only email. It did take forever and a day to get the darned thing. Wonder if they’re having scaling issues.

Looks like Plurk transactional email invites are considered spam by many webmail systems. I wonder why.

I noticed a couple of times this morning inviting people, that there was a caution: ”

“Spam issues: If your friends can’t find your Plurk invitation, please tell them to look into their spam / trash folder”

I sent 2 to other of my own email accounts, and haven’t received them. Anyone have one that I can use as an example for deconstructing exactly why these are considered spam? (And do Plurk some free work, ha!)

This is really not saying very good stuff about Plurk- and if you want your friends to use it, are they going to be that thrilled to check in the Spam folder? Otherwise the site has been a real delight. It’s a combination of Twitter with threaded messaging & a timeline.

A quick guess: badly formed HTML, strange subject line, and because it’s a social network, probably bombards networks and they don’t have good deliverability and sender reputation. But this is all guesswork until I see one!

Just a quick shoutout to one of my sponsors - Emma Marketing right there on the sidebar. They have a very nice 30-Second Tour. Go Emma!

Dear Anna,

Thanks
Testing in the Dark

Dear Testing,
Good news, there are a couple of email service provider companies that have this kind of thumbnail preview: Inbox Inspector (MailChimp), design testing (Campaign Monitor), and my former client used ReturnPath’s Design Preview. As for a free service, it’s not available, I believe. The best way is the hard way: setup accounts in various webmail accounts that you care about, just to make sure they work.

This is a tough issue, which is why the Email Standards Project is so vital. If you’re doing complex HTML emails you could quickly go down a geeky vortex trying to get it just right in each browser. The thing to do is to follow best practice guidelines so that it fails gracefully in the less used email/browser conditions.Also, know your subscriber list and work on the big email players (basically don’t sweat the small stuff- but design it so everyone can see it basically).

A set of tests that I do for webmail accounts, because they are the most stringent test combinations:
PC, IE 6,7, Gmail/Yahoo
PC, Outlook’s webmail (web access client)
PC, AOL Webmail

Mac OSX/Firefox/Gmail/Yahoo
Mac OS X/Safari/Gmail/Yahoo
Mac OS X/ AOL webmail

That test suite will get the tough ones- Gmail is one of the strictest, and if you don’t care about Lotus Notes, there you go. It’s worth setting up a free AOL web account.

I setup a template a year ago, and tested across that suite above, to note the best practices for cross-browser/mail design. Check it out: “Designing Web Emails,” and the resource list is good too, at the end of that post.

Other Resources:
Email Marketing Reports’ Testing resources list
Email Standards Project

I wrote about Political Spamming, and how our dearly elected circumvent and generally ignore CAN-SPAM regulations, and general email etiquette. Well lately the spam in my inbox is from public relations professionals. At issue:
- no reference to how they got your email
- strange subject lines “News item for ya, Anna” (???)
- largely irrelevant content - None of my blogs even remotely get close to this kind of content: celebrity diets.
- no unsubscription process - nor indicator on how they got my email.
- no reference to who they are, where they are from or on whose behalf they act - who is this from?

And the email in question:

At the Marketing Sherpa talk last February I sat at a table with a PR person who admitted that her industry does have the most heinous email etiquette. We joked for a bit about the Wired editor Chris Anderson (author of Long Tail) published a list of all of the PR spammers — as a kind of quid-pro-quo. I like this quote from Chris, regarding what press releases he does use:

Given that each one of those side projects is more narrow and geeky than the last, it’s a rare press release indeed that is focused enough to be relevant.

That’s what we focus on in email marketing: relevancy. So yes, it’s good PR vs. bad PR, it’s knowing the audience.

Just checked and that domain- popculturepr.com- is in Chris’ list. Sigh. Well, here are to the PR companies that don’t want to be considered spammers. Tips: warm up the cold call by…

- Doing some research & show your work. Do any of my posts seem at all interested in celebrities? If so, reference them in the email so you draw the connections for me.
- Work on the Subject Line. Use more words to describe who you are from: pop culture PR, and what blog this is in reference to. I write several!
- Provide an unsubscription. This can be your company’s list, or from some parent corporation. It ensures that you’re creating an opt-in list of journalists, and you won’t spam me, and generally “I asked for it.” It will raise your reputation with the journalist and set expectation.
- More sender branding. It’s simple to the point of being… spammy. Tell me where you’re from.

More Reading
Techdirt: PR Spam On Why You Shouldn’t PR Spam Bloggers?
Chris Anderson vs. Public Relations Spam

I love my local bike shop. I’m at the foot of the “twisty street” in San Francisco, Lombard, so we get lots of tourists, and there are lots of bike rental places, because it is a great starting point for several rides across the Golden Gate Bridge, around the city, or around the waterfront. The owner of this bike shop started it out of his basement, helping his friends repair bikes. The real biking shop district is two miles south, in a completely different neighborhood. Can a small bike repair & reseller shop survive outside of that district, with high rents of a touristy neighborhood? I love this place so I’d like it to stay- and therefore have been stopping by lately brainstorming marketing ideas.

Who Is Your Ideal Customer?
First, we talked about the ideal customer. For him, I’d focus on the “weekend warriors” and not the die-hard cyclists, which can be tough for him because he’s a die hard cyclist, bike collector, and those are his friends. But that’s not the money, and the biking community in SF is very political, so I’d steer away from polarizing personalities in the groups. Weekend Warriors (WW) are single people who work during the day but need to escape on the weekend. Who love to bike- but haven’t fixed their bike, bought one, have a plan on where to bike, etc. The towering apartment buildings surrounding his cute Victorian are full of these Weekend Warriors. Getting location and services information to them is the number one priority. He came to this conclusion too and started stocking inexpensive touring bikes ideal for tooling around the city. He’s already noticed a bump in sales.

These apartment buildings have security and won’t let you paper them frequently, so instead, do a few events to draw attention to the location. When they’re nearby, offer services that line up with their goals. Get them to remember the name and location, so when the opportunity arises, his shop is nearby and available.

F2F Events
Friday afternoon free beer & appetizers in the shop- an “open house” with notification to either patrons in the building that you’ve cultivated, or by putting a flier in the nearby laundromat, nearby bars, etc. Find the places where these folks hang out. At the shop, either pass out the little plastic tire opener that you use to repair flats with your location & name, or a map of nearby getaways, with time estimates, that are easy to do but beautiful, and tailored to the out of shape WW (ha). Also great: a xeroxed sheet showing “safe roads” in San Francisco for WW’ers. Make sure everyone who comes by walks away with the tool lever or flier in their hand - get it on the fridge! (Magnet is a good idea too)

Setup a clipboard on the counter to get email addresses - and maintain a weekly newsletter of bike riding tips and quick repairs. Refer to it during sales and other chats in the store.

Setup a weekly ride - sometime afterwork would be best. Just a half an hour or so. Make sure to wear a t-shirt or jersey with branding. Cycle through the neighborhood either coming or going to improve visibility in the target area. Have some on hand if other cyclists get cold (they will). This will be amazing visibility.

The Social Network Bit: Hash Ride
This is a more elaborate plan, but I think could get a lot of customers in one fail swoop; setup a neighborhood hash ride (credit to my sister Jenny for this idea). Our neighbhorhood, North Beach, an Italian & a tightknit, packed restaurant district. Pick a few restaurants that are local favorites (using Yelp, or word of mouth) and organize beforehand to have little appetizers setup near the doorway. Setup a route of biking to each restaurant- keep it a secret from the attendees. At each restaurant, have a little table sign pointing to the next restaurant. In this way, folks can be spread out but on the same route, and meet at the same end-up point. The combination of uniqueness of the event, co-branding with restaurants, and wearing the jerseys (it always gets cold in SF), along with free food- will increase visibility for the store and its personality, which is a fun, friendly, local resource for the neighborhood. Make sure to get the email addresses of participants so they can find out about the next fun/weird event- and make sure to maintain the newsletter!

Maintaining an Online Presence
Online networking: the WW will want to plan their weekend while at work, so make sure to use online review systems, and online social tools. Have someone- like me- sign onto these systems and promote the events via message boards on Yelp, Upcoming, etc. It’s the social organizer tools that will bring people out of the condo towers.

Ideally, setup a twitter account and follow some attendees ahead of time- get a few of the cyclists to twitter along the way, employees or friends-of-the-store (me). This can be a great promotional tool for the next Hash ride. Take photos during the ride and post to various social networks/flickr streams for promotional use.

(updated 4/5- added screenshots & SocialThing) I’ve been doing some informal (ahem) research on social networks: pownce, friendfeed, plurk & socialthing, and here is a featureset cheatsheet, going from old-to-new, so you too can sound in-the-know. This is a select few of frequently used ones- not a survey of the overwhelming amount out there.

MySpace: we all know what this is- profile-oriented site with bulletin boards, free-form design (which makes it ugly, in my opinion) and lots of widgest (ad-hoc applications).

Facebook: same as MySpace, but design is locked. Cleaner, and they’ve setup some privacy. Users can create “statuses” which are live- mobile and iPhone integration is great!- messaging. Scrabble is fun. I get quite a few links to this blog when I post an article. User adoption is very high.

Twitter: Live messaging, from user-to-many or user-to-user. Direct mail is available (private messaging to one other user). You can see all of your friend’s twitters. No other features, it’s very simple. Lately the systems have been faulty and failing, which led me to follow one of my high profile friends to this service… and onto the newer, more noteworthy social networks:

Pownce

A social oriented extension of Digg, brought to you by (the founders of) Digg. Persnickety barriers to registration, adding friends, etc. turned me off of full adoption and obsession. If you’re a fan, please post as I kind of don’t get the allure. Example of Pownce.

I’ve clicked on this email in my inbox a few times, and when I finally opened it, I was like, here is something new and interesting going on in email marketing.

What’s done right, in my opinion:

• Catchy subject line: “Brag About Yourself!” - which, for its target demographic, ad agency employees, agents, marketeres, etc., will hit an appreciative audience. The directness and tongue-in-cheekness also works well, for advertising folks who appreciate good copy.
• Nice images-off management design-wise. Check the font size and width. It works with the branding and the images when you load. Very nicely done. Only one or two broken images that do contribute once loaded. No spacer GIFs so a very clean layout with images-off.

With images on:

• There’s an offer, but it’s most a call to action to make the “open” a “click”. I think this is good- offers in subject lines, motivating the open, tend to attract the discount shopper, which is a less meaningful segment. In this kind of offer, I think they get far more opens with a non-offer subject line.

One of my friends, Greg Dewar, a political consultant, who is currently integrating social networking in campaigns, commented on my post regarding Political Spam, in his post, Email Spam From Campaigns in Full Force:

Political campaigns need to resist the urge to blast out lots of crappy emails just because it’s easy or free. Spamming people is a sure-fire way to piss off voters, and mealy mouthed justifications about how the CAN SPAM act doesn’t apply to ‘em just makes people even more pissed off.

Instead, it’s better to use online social networks, such as Facebook, to recruit supporters and communicate with them, and allow them to opt in to online communications. Everyone’s happy and no one gets spammed!

Right on- not only is CAN SPAM a courtesy to your constituents, but leveraging social networks as an acquisition channel is a gimme for politicians, if done right.

How does one leverage the social network world as an entrepreneur, small business or company? I’m reading Jeremiah Owyang’s article on FriendFeed, What Friendfeeds, Micromem Means For Your Brand, and Tamara Gielen’s article on using Twitter, How Did I Add the Twitter Window, on her use of Twitter and its dialog with other email experts, on her blog.

Jeremiah’s tips:

However, if you’re attempting to evangelize your company using social tools, you can create a user name around your brand and start to aggregate your brands social assets in one location. Then, you can have conversations with those that have an affinity with your company, learning and sharing with them. Do not think of this tool as a one-way publishing systems, it’s an interactive conversation of give and take. In the long run, content created about your brand (employees or customers) will aggregate into one location. This will be particularly effective for product lines, events, and launches.

Tamara’s tips:

In this case I created a separate Twitter account called “emailexperts” and with this account I’m following a bunch of email professionals. The feed shows all the people that I follow with this account. Want to be added? Just follow @emailexperts on Twitter and I’ll follow you back :-)

Jeremiah’s talking more 10,000 foot pole about implementing the social network phenomenon for businesses, Tamara is more hands-on about it. I believe that if setup effectively- a friend is setting up Facebok apps for politicans, along similar lines- it can be a very powerful tool for any brand or business.

Managing two twitter accounts is tough, and it’s not quite built for it (no unique sessions per browser so you have to eithe rmaintain two browser types (firefox/safari/i.e.,etc.) or log out and in each time to switch personal-to-professional.

I’m still in a learning curve with FriendFeed (FF), and it ends up a bit mise en abyme* when you have FF posting feeds to Facebook, which posts feeds to FF. (Same with Flickr). Still aggregators like this make the hyper-communication so quick and easy.

The twitter account for Adventures here is “advent_in_email” or via my email address- anna_billstrom-at-yahoo.com.

* the effect of standing between two mirrors! Love this phrase.

So I’m reading Chad White’s post, Inbox Evolution May Force Facebook To Change Its Business Cards, and Morgan Stewart’s earlier post, Email Is Not Dead, But Preferences Need to Evolve, also, eMarketer’s What Is the Future of E-Mail?. I once again wonder: why is everyone in Email so concerned about social networks? It’s just not a big deal. Why do I think this?

Social networks *need* email. Like a drug. How do you register for them? Email. How do you get little notifications all day? Email. It’s the intermediary step between getting acquainted and total obsession with a social network: email.

The thing is that kids & web2.0 developers don’t think of it as “email,” they think of it like water, or air, or something they’ve always had and never appreciated. Sure, we may have seen an email usage trajectory going out the roof during the early oughts, and now it’s leveling, but I refuse to be all doom & gloom about the future of email. Every time I sign up for a new social site, or sit in a meeting with Web 2.0 developers and talk about functional features, email is a requirement.

Alternatives: Sure, we’d all like RSS to be the default newsletter delivery mechanism, but for most users it’s just not there yet. And even if it was, it’s not going to be the end-all that email is. Email is- like the college kid said in the Email Insider talk, “Free,” and limitless, moreso than SMS. SMS, even twitter, with its word length and quirks, just aren’t going to replace the foundation that has been set with email. It’s creating new users, it’s branching out in new ways to communicate, but it’s not wholly supplanting.

If we’re searching around for a fear, let’s think of this: is email messaging turning into a functional, transactional realm? Are the long conversations and threads gone? If standardization happens, which I hope it does, I bet a lot of HTML and image support will be further downgraded. We may have to re-conceptualize the goals of email based on its accepted use.

(This is a series: See Believing the Numbers)

Dear Anna,

Thanks
Blinded by Ops

Dear Blinded,
Strongmail is basically built for internal mail systems like this, but you probably don’t have it. Keep it in mind, though, if you do want a more robust metrics & control system on those internal messages. Deliverability usually refers to seeding your output with specific emails that are then tracked and tested through a third party software. To analyze real customer emails going out in a custom application, that’s a different story.

Essentially, it’s a log parsing problem- as all mail systems issue logs based on the act of sending an email (and failures associated). There are log parsers out there. Getting a one-time parsing of the emails shouldn’t be costly or an issue, if you have internal resources you can point at the problem. Using Habeas as a professional services may work- or any other deliverability expert- as they probably do this as part of discovery of any project.

Getting an ongoing view of internally sent email, though, is a bit thornier. You need to setup trigger points in the application that populate a database (ideally) with various records: sent, opened, clicked, and has segment and cell names associated so you can do some live tracking of the effects of transactional systems. Essentially you want to design an API to another email service, and have the developers access that class or function instead of outputting to sendmail/qmail, or whatever internal mail system they are using.

If you have experiencing parsing mail logs with a favorite tool or also have a situation like this, please comment!

I was describing to my two sisters the merits of temporary email addresses over Memorial Day weekend. It’s like using a fake middle initial in your name when you buy things, then when you get catalogs in the mail with that initial, you know who sold your address (always an interesting experiment!).

Web email now supports sub addresses (also called “plus addressing”), from back in the day with sendmail. Yahoo & Google make it possible for you to extend your email address in various ways so you can track how your email gets picked up. Next time you register for something, use “username+potterybarn@gmail.com” instead of “username@gmail.com”. If you end up on some random mailing list with that to: address, Pottery Barn has sold your list. I should have done this when I registered to vote! Yahoo has a more convoluted method, called “disposable emails,” using AddressGuard, that probably won’t be embraced by non-Geeks.

If temporary email addresses ever get widespread, I can see consumers using it to further identify and opt-in to communication that they want. If they’re getting a Pottery Barn email, and their To Address is “username+potterybarn” they are going to be more likely to access and view. They could inclusively filter select mailers into folders based on the “To” address.

I see on message boards that the tendency is for marketers to filter out anything with “+” in it, as most folks who are currently using this are using it as a manual spam filter, and to weed out the bad promotional lists that aren’t using opt-in processes, or loosely define opt-in. I would like to see some usage metrics on this- if more people are using the “+” sign as way to narrowly filter their email, or if it’s just a geek thing.

Links:
Temporary Gmail Addresses
Yahoo information on AddressGuard
From lovely wikipedia on Email Addressing:

Disposable addresses of this form, using various separators between the base name and tag are supported by several email services, including Runbox (plus and minus), Google Mail (plus), Yahoo! Mail Plus (minus)[1], and FastMail (plus)[2].

Great post by Laura at Word to the Wise- wish I’d read it before I posted! Disposable or Temporary Addresses