Mailman Steve Padgett, age 58, stood before a Federal Court judge recently to receive his sentence. The crime? Delaying and destroying the very mail he was supposed to be delivering– third class mail, or more commonly, the JUNK.

This spring, authorities were contacted by a utility worker who noticed what appeared to be an excessive amount of mail piled at Steve Padgett’s home in Raleigh. When postal authorities went to investigate, they discovered third-class mail stacked in Padgett’s garage and buried in his lawn.

According to Padgett’s attorney Andrew McCoppin, it wasn’t a conscious stand against waste or a junk mail protest that spurred the mailman to hold onto the mailers. Rather, it was the inability to meet the demands of a job in a growing part of the county while contending with heart problems and complications from his diabetes.

Padgett was given probation, fined and also sentenced to 500 hours of community service.  And as a way to express our support for Mailman Steve and his junk mail minimizing tactics, MailChimp has helped bail him out by contributing to a fund that will cover Padgett’s fines.

How does this relate to email marketing you ask? Mailman Steve was keeping the spam out of people’s physical mailboxes, in the same way that MailChimp works to keep it out of your inbox. By taking simple steps like creating a good permission reminder and adhering to proper emarketing etiquette, you can take steps to ensure your email’s relevance and deliverability.

Major Source of Online Scams and Spams Knocked Offline (Washington Post)
“We looked into it a bit, saw the size and scope of the problem you were reporting and said ‘Holy cow! Within the hour we had terminated all of our connections to them.”

And have you ever wonder how spammers make money anyway? And how much?

Study shows how spammers cash in (BBC News)

“After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted…the response rate for this campaign was less than 0.00001%…these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period,” said the researchers.”

So how do spammers send so many emails, anyway? If they can do it, there must be some legal loophole allowing anyone to do it, right? So that means we can all buy emal lists and blast out spam. Right?

Um, no. Spammers have to hijack computers to do their dirty work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet (scroll down to “Formation and Exploitation”)

If spammers can get away with this, then so can I, right?
They don’t. And no, you can’t:
Authorities Shut Down Spam Ring (NYtimes.com)

http://directmag.com/magill/0729-suicide-spammer/index1.html

Includes interesting back story about a vendor that once worked with that spammer.

Over the last week or so, I’ve heard from a few programmers and developers who’ve been forced in some way or another to help their employer send spam. I’m talking about the kind of spam where you buy lists from a 3rd world country, setup offshore servers, then repeat the process over and over again as you get blocked by ISPs (the developers eventually wound up finding new jobs out of disgust).

It’s easy to spot obvious spammers like that.

But what if you’re working with a client, and something about their email project just doesn’t sound right? But you can’t quite put your finger on it, and you don’t quite know how to tell the client that what they’re doing is wrong? This free guide might help you:

Warning Signs Your Client is Spamming

At MailChimp, we’ve had to shut down quite a few creative agencies for their client’s bad email habits. Sadly, most problems could have been easily prevented.

We’ve posted a free PDF guide (9 pages): Warning Signs Your Client Is Spamming.

The free downloadable guide covers how to tell if your client is crossing the line, and how to gently guide them back over from the dark side (without losing the project). More specifically, we go over:

• The most common reasons we’ve had to shut down agency accounts at MailChimp
• The industries (your clients) that always seem to have the most risk (and why)
• How to define spam in words your client will understand, and how to determine when a client just needs a punch in the gut
• How to detect inexperienced clients who may be doing things to get themselves (and you) in trouble

Reading through the FTC Spam Summit Report (472k PDF), I came across an interesting study they did, buried way back in the Appendix.

To determine how effective ISP spam filters are, they created 150 fresh new email addresses, and posted them at 50 locations around the Internet:

“The 50 Internet locations included websites controlled by the FTC and several popular message boards, blogs, chat rooms, social networking sites, video posting sites, and sites with user-generated content that had high hit/visit rates.”

Then they measured how much spam they got, how fast, and how much their ISPs’ spam filters blocked…

“At the conclusion of the two week study period, the 50 Unfiltered Addresses had received a total of 718 pieces of spam. At the conclusion of the five week study period, these same addresses had received 3,045 pieces of spam. The total weekly amount of spam sent to the Unfiltered Addresses more than doubled from weeks one and two to weeks three through five.”

Wow. The ISP that had no spam filters got over 3,000 pieces of spam in a little over one month. The two ISPs that had built-in spam filters blocked spam pretty good: 93% at one ISP, and 78% at another.

Most Email is Harvested from Websites, Not Blogs, Forums, etc.

Ever wonder where the spambots harvest email addresses the most?

“At the conclusion of the two week study period,  86% percent of the total amount of spam messages received at Unfiltered Addresses were from addresses that had been posted on the FTC’s website pages, and only 14% percent of the spam messages had been received from addresses posted elsewhere.”

Spam Traps

To conduct the study, the FTC setup 150 fresh new email addresses that were used strictly to trap spam. These are called “spamtraps.” ISPs and anti-spam companies setup spamtraps all the time. If an email marketer buys a list from a disreputable source (who probably bought their list from yet another disreputable source who harvested addresses from websites), chances are high that list has a spamtrap on it that could get you instantly blacklisted. Some ISPs even turn very old email addresses (from closed customer accounts) into spam traps, and post them around the Internet. That’s why email marketers should never send campaigns to very old lists.

The Importance of Authentication to the FTC
One more random tidbit from the report (from their “Next Steps” section, pg 26):

“Staff will…urge ISPs to further implement negative scoring for non-authenticated email…”

Clearly, the FTC is concerned with the impact of Phishing, and they feel authentication is an effective technological weapon against it. This is a sign that they intend to push ISPs to penalize non-authenticated emails. On a related note, check out this interview with Yahoo: Will Yahoo block messages that aren’t authenticated?

More details can be found at Word to the Wise (a great deliverability resource, btw)

The bad Roadrunner email addresses were automatically removed by MailChimp when they bounced back, so there’s nothing you have to do. Note that you can’t just take an old @roadrunner.com address and switch it to @comcast.com.

Let Your Customers Submit Change of Email Address
This might be a good time to look into adding an “Update your profile” link to the bottom of all your MailChimp newsletters. That way, when your customers change their email addresses, they can log in and update their information on your list if they want to continue receiving your campaigns.