In 2006 ESP (Email Service provider) e360 insight, who send emails on behalf of their clients sued blocklist/anti spam organisation spamhaus after it listed its domains/IPs as allegedly sending spam.

The UK based Spamhaus did not defend the case which was brought to the courts on the basis of loss of earnings and the ruling was made in their absence. Spamhaus was ordered to pay $11.7m in compensation to e360 Insight, pull the organisation’s blocklist listing, and post a notice stating that it was inaccurate and wrong to say e360 Insight was involved in sending spam.

Spamhaus ignored the ruling and e360 insight responded by calling on the court to order the domain registrars Tucows or ICANN to suspend the spamhaus domains which would have taken the whole blocklist offline however the court denied this request.

e360 claim that 3 billion out of the 6.6 billion emails it sent on behalf of clients were blocked as a direct result of the listing as such a large percentage of mail administrators use the spamhaus blocklist as a method of determining whether a particular email is spam or not.

In mid June 2010, the appeals court slashed the $11.7m ruling to just $27,002 after it said e360 insight had been unable to substantiate its claims for loss of earnings and that the method used to calculate the loss of earnings was unscientific and not backed up by expert opinion.

The $27k was made up of $27000 compensation for loss of one e360 client which works out to be one months additional work that e360 would have had if it were not for the blocklisting and for the loss of two further clients $1 per client was awarded.

The judge also turned down e360 insight’s request of an injunction preventing spamhaus from being able to list e360 again in the future.

If you have been using your iPad to check your Gmail account you will have noticed that recently Gmail has changed to give you a full compose window rather than having a split screen between the inbox and compose screens.

Google have updated the Gmail website to detect iPad’s and to hide the inbox messages on the side and make more of the compose screen which is now visible immediately.

Below: The iPad showing the new Gmail compose window.

To try out Gmail on the iPad, just go to gmail.com in Safari. Please note that the new interface is only available in US English at the moment and google have not confirmed plans to roll this out in other languages.

On the day before the launch of the Apple iPad in the UK, Email Manual shares a couple of thoughts on what impact it may have on email marketing in the future.

Target audience

Lets think for a moment about the iPad’s target audience, business or home user?

Without a doubt the iPad’s target market is predominately the home user. Likewise their mac’s, mac books and iPhones are aimed at home users. Yes sure there are business users, but predominantly the target market and where Apple excel most is the home user.

What does this mean for email marketers?

The iPad is designed to be mobile, this allows home users to use it sitting comfortably on the sofa browsing or whilst commuting and enables them to email and use apps whilst relaxed. It is not designed to be used at a desk, for answering email after email and therefore the user is likely to be more relaxed and have more time to absorb your brand message. If a user opens their email they are less likely to be short of time and more likely to engage with the content provided its relevant and targeted to them. Arguably mobile devices offer the same and for sure mobile use of email is increasing month on month but the iPad offers an unparaelled experience where the web is not compromised by smaller screens, incompatible webpages and emails and consequently we expect to see higher engagement on the iPad than the current mobile devices.

HTML 5 Standards Support including video in email

The iPad uses the standard apple webkit to render emails, this means that if you currently test your emails on Apple Mac’s or iPhones your email is likely to display identically in the iPad as it uses the same rendering engine.

In addition to supporting modern web standards the iPad offers images on be default as soon as an email is opened, and even in the preview pane. For email marketers this means opens are tracked from the moment the email is displayed within the large preview screen without having to have the user click or enable images for your email.

The apple webkit also has HTML 5 support, which along with being able to render images on the fly has native video support. Yes, this means video in email without using third party products such as goodmail certified video or having to use a streaming server and relaying on third party components being installed remotely on the device displaying the webpage or email.

Size of the market

Within 12 months of the iPhone launch the market penetration grew to be over 4% of people using email. Most of these people combine their use with another device but if your email didnt look interesting to start with on the iPhone the chances are it got deleted and never reached the PC/Mac which traditionally you may well have been designing for.

If iPad usage grows in a similar fashion we may well find that close to 10% of all emails we send will either be opened by an iPad or other mobile device users. The Email Manual advise is that you start testing your emails on mobile devices as this is becoming a huge proportion of your potential customer base and if your emails don’t work properly on these sorts of clients you are likely to find the subscriber emotionally unsubscribing from your emails. Emotional unsubscribes result in more spam complaints, less converted prospects and ultimately less revenue from your email marketing campaigns.

Do you have an Apple iPad already? Would love to hear your feedback specifically around how it handles email.

In a recent review of last months traffic to our website 2.82% of you were using iPhones to visit Email Manual. A further 0.7% were using iPod’s and 0.25% were using andriod based mobiles.

We are only expecting on the move access to rise as a result of the iPad introduction outside of the US at the end of this month and consequently as a result of the 3.8% mobile use on our site we have made some optimisations to the look, feel and usability of the site using mobile browsers.

You will no longer see the normal website as displayed if you visit the blog via a PC or Mac but instead you will see a specific mobile version of the site which is designed to look and feel like a native iPhone application.

If for any reason you prefer to see the site as if it were displayed within a standard browser there is a toggle button available at the bottom of the mobile version of the site which you can use to toggle the feature on and off.

We hope you will enjoy the easier, more flexible site from your mobiles and look forward to your feedback.

A small internet service provider in the US has been awarded nearly $2.6m in a lawsuit it filed against a company that sent just under 25,000 spam messages over an 18-month period.

The court awarded the ISP damages of $865,340, but went on to triple the amount, to 2.596m, because, they said, the Find a Quote spammers, including defendant Edward Heckerson, had employed automatic scripts to send their messages.

For more information and the full story please see ‘the register’ article.

The new look and enhanced functionality version of hotmail has been revealed.

The new hotmail makes major advancements by integrating with Microsofts cloud based skydrive (allowing people to send upto 10gb attachments) to share videos, images etc as well as competing with googlemail by allowing users to modify their powerpoint and office documents online.

Other new features include:

• Social email highlights: Hotmail identifies and categorises emails from social networks like facebook in your inbox, making it easier to sort through your emails.
• One click filters: Filter your entire inbox to only show messages from specific contacts or companies.
• Sweep functionality: A virtual brush that allows people to easily remove or file emails from a specific sender in their inbox into folders. Auto-sweep can archive any future emails from that sender so they do not appear as clutter in the inbox automatically.
• Optional conversation view: Hotmail gives people the option to view messages by threaded conversation to view an entire conversation series in one go.
• Advanced search and automated search suggestions. Hotmail has added an advanced search pane and made advanced search easy with inbox search auto-complete.  People can type a single letter into the search box and Hotmail automatically suggests a number of searches to help people find the email they are looking for.
• Enhanced support for mobile users. Mobile browsing is optimised for the latest round of smartphones like the iPhone allowing seemless browsing as if you were on your computer.

In addition there is the new “Microsoft active view” which enables you to view specific content directly within the email body such as YouTube videos, Flickr photo albums, and Linkedin notifications.

The new hotmail will first be released to Austrialian users within a few months and will then be spread to the rest of the globe.

A preview of the new hotmail features is available below:

On May 3, 1978, The first documented spam message was sent out to 393 recipients on ARPANET. The message was sent by Gary Thuerk and advertised the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computer. Several thousand people were on the ARPAnet then, most of them computer scientists.

Thuerk wanted to send all 600 ARPAnet members on the West Coast of the US an e-mail invitation. He decided it was too much work to send everyone a single e-mail, which was the standard practice at the time, so he decided to send one e-mail to everyone. The reaction from the net community was fiercely negative and earned DEC a stern reprimand from Major Raymond Czahor – chief administrator of Arpanet, but Thuerk’s spam did generate some sales.

Thuerk’s innovation earned him the dubious honor of being added to the Guinness World Records when the term “spam” didn’t exist yet.

Following the first spam message a long chain of discussion between APRAnet users who were concerned about censorship on Apranet occured which can be viewed here.

On spams 32nd birthday despite many ideas, we still have not managed to resolve the spam problem, willl domain based reputation be the answer?

Sources:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Thuerk

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/patterson/18084/spam-turning-30-this-month-no-gifts-please/

Clever piece of viral marketing! IKEA create BRÜN, KAMERUN and KLEGGI kitchens inspired by the potential PMs – http://bit.ly/ce5BIu

Since around 11:30am GMT this morning hotmail has not been accepting any inbound email for hotmail.com, .co.uk live or msn domains.

When an SMTP server trys to make a connection to any of hotmail MX servers the connection is either accepted and then closed immediately or outright rejected.

There is nothing on the hotmail/Microsoft postmaster site to acknowledge the problem at this stage however it has been reported on twitter that it may be down for as long as 8 hours which allegedly came from a Microsoft technical support representative.

Mail server administrators should monitor outbound queue sizes and take measures to protect their email infrastructure in the event that their queues become too large/full.

If you have any further information on the issue please leave a comment so that it can be shared with other readers.

Today Yahoo! confirmed that as of this month they no longer participate in Goodmail certified mail. It has not be confirmed as to why Yahoo! have withdrawn from the scheme but it is well known amongst the industry that Yahoo! have had continued infrastructure issues with their inbound mail and this may be related.

Its not all bad news for Goodmail customers however, last month we reported on a rumour that hotmail were due to start supporting the certified mail scheme. We still believe this is likely to happen.

Yahoo! today announced to the industry today that…

On March 24th, we will decommission the MX record for ‘gms.mail.yahoo.com’, the dedicated domain to which senders have been routing CertifiedEmail for Yahoo! Mail recipients. To ensure no disruption of email delivery to Yahoo!, we recommend clients consult with Goodmail and make any necessary changes to their email systems in advance of this date.

Email Manuals advise is that you should imediately stop sending goodmail certified messages to Yahoo! domains including rocketmail.com and ymail.com as you will not be receiving the benefits which come from doing so. Instead you should deliver mail, uncertified, to Yahoo!’s mainsteam MX records which are published in the normal manor.