spam | Internet Marketing Blog

Inactive subscribers: silent but deadly to email marketers

Email marketers' lives just got even tougher with the recent changes to the Windows Live Hotmail user experience, which enables users to better organise their inbox.

The changes include the addition of a trusted senders icon to prevent phishing; the ability to "sweep" or automatically file "grey/gray mail," email that subscribers signed up for but no longer want; and the use of one-click and time-travelling filters, which remove messages that reach the inbox but are later discovered to be from senders with a poor reputation.

by Margaret Farmakis 20 July 2010 11:32am 0 comments

Consumers, spam and high-risk behavior

maawg study Tens of millions of consumers say they're aware of 'bots, yet they continue to interact with spam. Chalk it up to some sort of blissful, can't-happen-to-me oblivion.

The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) just completed a survey of North American and European consumers and found that despite their awareness of the dangers, they're playing with spam in ways that can leave them vulnerable to malware infections. Half had opened spam, clicked on a link in spam, opened a spam attachment, or replied or forwarded to spam. All these actions open the door to fraud, phishing, identity theft and infection. Most consumers said they're aware 'bots exist, but only a third believe they're vulnerable to an infection.

by Rebecca Lieb 26 March 2010 14:02pm 1 comment

How not to use Twitter, by Rentokil

Social media marketing isn’t always easy to get right, especially when it comes to rapidly developing and changing platforms such as Twitter. However, it is very easy to get wrong, as UK pest control giant Rentokil found out this month.

by Kevin Gibbons 16 March 2010 11:29am 35 comments

Some newspapers may hate search engines, but they love SEO spam

The newspaper industry in general has a tepid relationship with search engines (particularly Google), but that doesn't mean that more than a few newspapers don't love SEO spam.

A post yesterday on GigaOm details how one former columnist at the struggling San Francisco Chronicle found that the Chronicle had taken her articles and liberally changed them up in a clear attempt to improve the article's ranking in the SERPs.

by Patricio Robles 11 March 2010 10:01am 7 comments

The rules of email engagement

Bulk email is dead. OK, some people might still be doing it, but does that mean it works as well as it could? Just look in your own junk folder to find the many emails you have opted into but no longer reach your inbox.

So why is bulk email on the way out? Well, let’s consider what the top three email ISPs have to say...

by Matthew Kelleher 14 January 2010 09:54am 1 comment

Everyone wants in on real-time search — especially hackers

In the battle to get real-time results into search engines, there's one business that stands to benefit a lot: spam. It's simply a fact of social life online that as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and others all struggle to provide the most relevant up to the second information, they are ceding quality control of results.

And that's only natural. Search engines have to relax their algorithms to get the most current information, which makes it exceedingly easy for spammers to win a spot at the top of search results pages. And as spamming gets easier for hackers, it also gets harder for digital marketers to get their results up on the page. Is there anything to be done about it?

by Meghan Keane 14 December 2009 20:27pm 3 comments

Facebook wins $711 million anti-spam lawsuit. But social spam is here to stay.

By now everyone online is accustomed to receiving and filtering spam in their inboxes, but recent spamming attacks on social sites like Facebook have caught many by surprise. Facebook is hoping to change all that, with a court win this week against uber spammer Sanford Wallace.

Facebook hopes that a $711 million fine and the threat of jail time will not only sideline Wallace, but function as a deterrent to future social spammers. But let's be honest. That's not going to happen.

by Meghan Keane 30 October 2009 22:14pm 1 comment

ISP filtering has changed: how will it affect email marketing?

Today’s musings are on deliverability, more precisely how important Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are to getting your precious email marketing campaigns into recipient’s inboxes.

They’ve been changing how they monitor what is spam and what isn’t, which means us marketers need to make sure we’re on top of this and reacting accordingly.

by Marc Munier 28 October 2009 11:17am 6 comments

SEOs are not spammers, evildoers, or opportunists

It seems like every few months, somebody has to write a blog post calling SEO a 'scam' of some sort. It's a meme that always works and this time around, it's coming from a guy named Derek Powazek, who calls SEOs "spammers, evildoers, and opportunists".

It's a great linkbait, which, ironically, is sure to help Powazek's SERPs.

by Patricio Robles 14 October 2009 15:53pm 10 comments

Are retailers making it easy to unsubscribe from emails?

If people want to unsubscribe from emails, it should be made as easy as possible, as the alternative for many customers is using the report spam option, something which can have an adverse effect on sender reputations with ISPs.

I signed up for emails from some of the top UK retailers, and have been seeing how easy (or otherwise) they are making it for customers to opt out of marketing emails...

by Graham Charlton 22 September 2009 12:36pm 13 comments