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This is the message sent out to our StrongMail customers. As we get more information and understanding I will update this blog

StrongMail Customers,

WHAT'S HAPPENING
Today, the FTC announced four new rule provisions under the CAN-SPAM Act. These new provisions bring some much needed clarification to several key definitions.

In summary, the new rule provisions address four topics:

Prohibition of an Opt-out Fee – This provision prohibits the imposition of any fee, any requirement to provide personally identifying information (beyond one’s email address), or any other obligation as a condition for accepting or honoring a recipient’s opt-out request.

Definition of "Sender" – CAN-SPAM now defines "sender" as the entity identified in the "from" line. The definition of “sender” was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single email message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements.

Definition of “Valid Physical Postal Address” - A “sender” of commercial email can now include an accurately registered post office box or private mailbox established under United States Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial email display a “valid physical postal address."

Definition of "Person" – Up until now, CAN-SPAM had no definition for "person," which created some confusion in regards to whom the act applied. With this new provision, "person" has been defined as an individual, group, unincorporated association, limited or general partnership, corporation, or other business entity. Note that non-profits are not exempt from CAN-SPAM.

HOW THIS MAY IMPACT YOU
These new rule provisions will not likely affect your day-to-day email operations, as these updates are more applicable to companies not currently following the email best practices that StrongMail promotes to all of its customers. In fact, the best practices we recommend go far above and beyond current CAN-SPAM provisions.

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO
If you think you might not be in compliance, you can review the FTC press release or the official May 12 Federal Register Notice for more information on the updated provisions.

If you haven't been keeping up with your data hygiene efforts, AOL is about to give you a good reason to get back on the wagon. The "Official AOL Postmaster Blog" has recently indicated that they are refining their filtering parameters to place a greater emphasis on the number of invalid recipients coming from a mailer. They haven't laid out the specifics, but they have said that if you have more invalids than others mailers that they deem similar to you, it will impact your delivery and also facilitate your removal from their whitelist.

AOL has always factored the number of invalid recipient's into a sender's reputation, but it sounds like their new process will weigh this factor more heavily in getting your email to the AOL inbox. If you’re a b-to-c mailer, you likely have a good number of AOL addresses that could be affected. However, even b-to-b mailers should take this as a wake-up call to ensure that their list hygiene practices are sound, and that bad addresses are regularly removed from all mailing lists.

At StrongMail, we highly recommend keeping your lists clean. We advise our own clients to keep their invalid recipients less then 5% of their total list, and we make it easy for them to do this with automated bounce processing and other handy tools in our email marketing solutions. In an era of sender accountability where reputation means more than content, you can't risk damaging the reputation you've worked so hard to establish. And remember that all the major ISPs look at the number of bad addresses you send to assess your reputation – not just AOL.

So, take a good long list at your lists, and make sure you have good processes in place to remove bad addresses. For more information on bounce management, including how hard and soft bounces should be treated differently, we encourage you to read our whitepaper, Get Smart About Bounce Management.

A recent survey conducted by Q Interactive and MarketingSherpa found that many users are using the "SPAM" button for a number of reasons. As far as the researchers are concerned, there is a lot of confusion by the end users as to what the purpose of the button really is. Within the press release, it is reported that the definition of SPAM has changed from Unsolicited to Unwanted.

To me, they are one in the same for the end users--when I talk to people every day that are not in the email industry, they see these as the same thing. Sure they might remember that they signed up for a newsletter, but if they no longer find it useful, to them it becomes SPAM. One time at a family gathering, everyone was trying to figure out exactly what I did. I asked the question--"what do you think SPAM is?" Almost everyone told me, it is the junk I got in my inbox that I don't want. So of course I dug deeper. What if you signed up for that junk, I asked. "Then they should make it worth my while, if it isn't, then it is SPAM," they replied. So by this definition hasn't SPAM always been email that people don't want, not just what they didn't ask for?

As of noon on March 25 (EST) ORDB, a blacklist that has not been in use for some time, began returning false positives. They did this as a way to forces users that continue to query their spam filters to stop. The overall effect is that all mail will be blocked on servers that are configured to use the ORDB service.
All that being said if you start to notice any major issues with some items not getting through you might want to have the end users check their spam filter configurations.

It has been formally announced that Yahoo is currently not accepting any more applications for their feedback loop program. This program has been widely successful so they are working on improving the processes for future versions of the applications process. From everything we know now this should have no affect on current customers that are part of the program. As we find out more information about this I will let you know.

Over the last week there has been a lot of news around some clients have seen an increase in the 4xx errors coming from Yahoo!. There have been reports that Yahoo! was under some type of attack from various spamming organizations and that they were using this method to fight off those attacks. Others believed that Yahoo! had officially put in a grey-listing methodology as part of their anti-spam efforts. Neither of these beliefs are correct.

Yahoo! has verified that they have recently put in new, more aggressive measures to fight illegitimate mail coming into their servers. While they have acknowledged that this may be have some affect legitimate mailers they are working on fine-tuning these systems. Their goal as always is to make sure that the legitimate mail that people want to receive gets to their end users, and that which they don’t is blocked. According to Yahoo!, any legitimate mail that has been received but not yet have been delivered will eventually reach the intended recipient as their inbound mail queues drain. They have asked for everyone’s understanding during this time and hope to have the issue resolved soon.
If you're seeing 451 4.70 [TS01] or [TS02] errors you should wait at least 4 hours before trying to redeliver the mail.

As always if you have any questions please feel free to reach out to our support group or for this particular issue you can go to http://postmaster.yahoo.com.

During last week and over the weekend, some of you might have noticed that more messages than usual were not getting through to Yahoo. The simple reason for this is that they seem to have some issues on their side that were reducing the number of messages that they could accept at any given time.

According to Yahoo's official blog site, they were experiencing issues with their POP accounts that were being sent to Outlook, Outlook Express and others. As stated on their blog "As a result we spent the last several days not only upgrading hardware resources for our SMTP servers, but also restructuring the way the bandwidth of these servers is allocated. We are confident that this solution will not only resolve the immediate problems, but also ensure that the systems are even more reliable in the future."

Hopefully all is fixed, but one thing we have to remember as senders, the ISPs aren't perfect either--they all do their best to keep their systems up and running, but some times they run into issues as well.

So a lot has happened since my last post with Yahoo. Not only have they decided not to accept Microsoft's offer, but apparently they are looking for other ways to compete with them. I have seen a couple of stories that have stated that they are in talks with AOL. So how would this, or even a Google agreement effect your email marketing plans? Well if they were to partner up with AOL, it would probably be the best scenario possible from an email marketing standpoint. AOL and Yahoo have always been the most open with that they expect from senders and give you as much information as possible to implement best practices. Not all ISPs are as open with that they expect as these two, so if they were to partner up, one would assume that this openness would only continue. I will keep watching to see what happens but as I said last time - there are a lot of things to figure out first before it is time to start worrying.

As most of you have probably heard by now, Microsoft has offered to purchase Yahoo!. As I was watching the news this morning while getting ready for work and heard this for the first time, my first thought was--wow what does this mean for email? Well I am sure a lot of you have already pondered that same question, but I thought I would share my thoughts with you as well.

First, the deal is not done yet, and for those of us that watch this industry as much as I do, it isn't a big surprise. Microsoft has to do something to keep up with Google, so by purchasing Yahoo! they are in a better position to do so. Secondly, if they do close this deal (which personally I would be surprised if they didn't), I don't think changing their email systems will be their top priority. To me, this deal is all about advertising, not email. That being said, I can't imagine that this merger would have any great effect on the email space for at least 2-3 years. Let's think about it for a minute.

1. Yahoo! and Microsoft/Hotmail use two different authentication methods, which one will they choose, or will they use both Sender ID and DKIM together?

2. Yahoo! manages a number of other domains through their partnership agreements such as SBC/Yahoo and others, what will they do with those streams of mail?

3. Will they simply get rid of one system and make everyone migrate to the other?

While these are all great questions that my team and I have already begun to ask, the great news is that we will have plenty of notice before any major changes occur. Through our relationships with both organizations, we will be able to prepare our customers and pro-actively manage any changes that might occur due to this proposed merger. Stay tuned for more on this as the saga continues.

In the last week or so both AOL and Yahoo have publicly made what some would consider big announcements.

Last week AOL officially announced that they are going to be implementing DKIM in the next couple of months as a part of their reputation calculations. As part of the industry group that helped put DKIM together and write the specs for this authentication method--this is great news for not only StrongMail but the industry as a whole.
According to AOL the main benefit of DKIM is flexibility and portability that’s just not there with just looking at the IP. So for shared IP’s they can look at the mail stream specifically. Provides infrastructure flexibility/portability it’s better for moving to new IP’s, reputation goes.

As for Yahoo!, they announced yesterday that they have partnered with Return Path to use their Sender Score Certified program as part of their reputation calculations. What does this mean, well we will have to wait and see exactly how this could affect their whitelisting procedures or any other filtering processes that they might use the SenderScore for. Stay tuned for any updates as they come.