Your Email Resource.
Industry News
News from the Email Marketing and deliverability Industry as well as news on trends on email use.
ESP’s judgement against blocklist spamhaus slashed to $27000
Jul 6th
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.
Updated Gmail via Safari on the iPad
Jun 30th
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.
How will the new Apple iPad impact email marketers?
May 27th
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.
Spammers ordered to pay tiny ISP whopping $2.6m
May 21st
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.
