Monthly Archives: December 2010

Happy Holidays and New Year wishes from Emailblog.eu

  By Remy | December 23, 2010 - 09:00 | Sitenews
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After no less than 52 posts published (yeah, I was surprised by the sheer number) in the past four months since the launch of Emailblog.eu on August 31st, we’re almost entering the new year. It’s been a very educating, interesting, funny and cool ride so far for me: 2011 will probably be no different.

Here’s some people whom I personally want to thank, wish them well and hope they’ll have a great year ahead of them! Conversations, discussions and plain simple goofing off has been fun with you guys. I plan on meeting you all in person as soon as possible :)

In no particular order sorted by my mind:

Shannon Holato, John Caldwell, Tamara Gielen, Jordie van Rijn, Stephanie Miller, Rory Carlyle, Anna Yeaman, Scott Hardigree, Chad White, Jean-Paul de Clerck, Jim Ducharme, Loren McDonald, Chris Donald, Ryan Phelan, Dylan Boyd, Matthew Vernhout, Alex Williams, Scott Cohen, Andrew Kordek, Andrew Bonar, Mark Brownlow, Kent McGovern, Kelly Lorenz, Elliot Ross, Morgan Stewart, Stefan Eyram.

Thanks! And to everyone visiting Emailblog.eu: Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Canadian anti-spam bill C-28 passes into law

  By Remy | December 22, 2010 - 09:00 | Security, Spam
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On the 15th of December the Canadian Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act (FISA), Bill C-28, was passed as law by the Federal Parliament and has received Royal Assent. This means that Canada finally has an actual and up-to-date spam law, which is quite strict too (that’s a good thing). The main purpose is to cut down the amount of spam people receive: the way to achieve this is by creating a comprehensive regulatory regime of offences, enforcement mechanisms, and severe penalties.

The basics involved in the new law are as follows:

- it is prohibited to send or cause or permit to be sent to an electronic address a commercial electronic message unless the person to whom the message is sent has consented to receiving it, whether the consent is express or implied.

- Address harvesting and dictionary attacks to gather email addresses are completely forbidden.

- The sender must be identified, and contact information must be included.

- Unsubscribe should be simple and completely processed within 10 days of unsubscribing.

Anti-phishing and anti-malware is also included in the law:

Anti-Phishing

FISA contains an anti-phishing provision that would prohibit a person, in the course of commercial activity, from altering the transmission data in an electronic message so that the message is delivered to a destination other than or in addition to the destination specified by the sender, without the sender’s express consent. The consent must be informed, and an effective and timely consent withdrawal mechanism must be provided as well.

Anti-malware

Lastly, the anti-malware provision under FISA prohibits a person, in the course of commercial activity, from installing any computer program on any other person’s computer system, or causing that computer program to send an electronic message from the computer system, without the consent of the owner or authorized user of the computer system. In most circumstances, the required consent must be express and informed, and an effective and timely consent withdrawal mechanism must also be provided. There are limited exceptions that permit implied consent to the installation of legitimate computer software. There is also a three-year transition provision that provides for implied consent to the installation of a software update or upgrade in limited circumstances.

For people familiar with the American CAN-SPAM act or the European guidelines/laws, the above should not pose any trouble in applying to current or future email marketing strategies and campaigns.

Hotmail introduces interactive email using Active Views

  By Remy | December 17, 2010 - 09:00 | Email clients
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Hotmail and a few pilot partners have introduced interactive email using Active Views, as noted on their Windows Live blog. The blog post notes that the way current emails are sent, the content is static and links lead people outside of the email to a different environment.

The Windows Live Hotmail team notes that these things take too much time and make the email experience as a whole non-lineair, and they have devised a new way to handle things: Active Views. The post also notes that this new technology hasn’t been available before because of security concerns: however Active Views is supposed to let code be run securely inside an email, without you as a receiver having to be concerned about privacy or malicious access to your computer.

Forms and other interactive options like searching are available within the email itself, as shown in this video:

I cannot stress how important this development is for the future of email: the time saved, the possibilities it opens and the amount of pleasure and results gained will be great. From the start the pilot partners will be Monster.com and Orbitz: they will show what the new wave of email will look like when it comes to hotel bookings and job searches. Two other big names will join in soon: Netflix and LinkedIn, so the platform will already have a nice base to do the pilot run of this new technology within the Hotmail email client.

The ideas already start coming into my mind of how to apply this new technology: luckily Hotmail is one of the biggest email providers in the EU compared to GMail and others, so the actual userbase should not be a problem. IN 2009 the Hotmail market share worldwide was just over 16%, and in the EU that is an even bigger share, as Yahoo! Mail’s share is smaller.

(stats (c) Campaign Monitor)

Update 17 dec 2010 – 10:22 CET:

More info about the technology called Microsoft Web Sandbox used to allow Active Views to run securely within Hotmail can be found on this page.

I really need to talk to HP about email frequency

  By Remy | December 16, 2010 - 09:00 | Email marketing, Email Marketing Design
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Yes, seriously. Sending one email a day sounds like fun, but receiving it? Not so sure. Have a look:

Since December 1st there’s one email per day, and before that one every ~ two days. The campaign 12 days of gifts started on Dec 1st, and kept going on ’till Dec 13th. In a 21-day window I received no less than 20 messages, averaging almost one a day. Imagine I’m subscribed to about 25 mailing lists of various companies: not uncommon these days. Imagine that all the marketers at all those companies have decided that Dec 1st would be their ‘let’s give this a big last blast run’ starting point, and they started sending out one message a day, like HP. A calculation of the amount of emails received in the 21-day time frame would result in a total of no less than 525 messages. That’s from 25 mailing lists alone: not counting personal email, notifications, invoices and all other type of email. Remember the crowded inboxes post I did 2,5 months ago? Here’s the prime example, right there.

First thing that comes to many people’s mind is: why don’t you just unsubscribe? That’ll teach them! But that’s not what I want. I want less, not nothing. Second suggestion would be to pause subscription or change the frequency, but neither is possible from the mailings: just unsubscribe and change email options. The emails themselves don’t look bad, but it seems the marketing crew over at HP haven’t looked at this from the receiving end: how would you feel if you would be spammed-a-lot without being able to do something about it except unsubscribing? Pretty all or nothing situation, which should not be the case. I wonder how many unsubscribes HP received because of ramping up their frequency: it also depends on expectations by the subscriber of course.

To close, here’s an example, the first email received on Dec 1st:

Take mobile seriously? Probably, cause iPhones account for 7% of opens

  By Remy | December 14, 2010 - 09:00 | Browsers, Email clients
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Yes, the people over at dotDigitalBlog have noted in a blog post that no less than 7% of email opens happening on their platforms are being done with iPhone. In contrast to that, other mobile platforms like Android, Blackberry and Nokia don’t seem to rake up as much usage as the iPhone. Also, Outlook 2007 outperforms Outlook 2010 by a 15% vs 1,5% share, which is quite big, seeing as Outlook 2010 was launched nearly a year ago.

Next to that, on the browser front there seems to be more sharing of market share going on: Internet Explorer 7 going down while Firefox and Chrome usage keep on growing. Good news for Internet Explorer 6 haters: it was down to 0,7% from 1,2% in January.

These are only figures from the dotMailer platform of course: consult with your ESP for usage figures of their platform, or even better: your specific contact base. As with everything, and especially in email marketing, your mileage may vary.

Google launches email cloud service Message Continuity

  By Remy | December 10, 2010 - 10:00 | Security
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A lot of Google/GMail news in recent days: first the Priority Inbox update and now Message Continuity. It’s a corporate cloud service for companies which want to have a backup when their Microsoft Exchange goes down. The new service is powered by Postini as noted on the official Google Blog: Google acquired Postini back in 2007.

The way Message Continuity works is by replicating email accounts which are hosted on Microsoft Exchange servers using the cloud services of GMail, Contacts and Calendar. In the event of failure, maintenance or (scheduled) downtime logging into GMail will suffice to continue email communications.

Next to having a backup in the cloud, actually making the transition to Google Apps later in time will be easier for companies because the data is in sync between both platforms: there will be no need to migrate email, contact and calendar data.

More information can be found on the Google Enterprise Blog and at www.google.com/postini.