By Sean D'Souza
Imagine you take a trip to your post box down the road
today to pick up the mail. To your surprise, you find nothing. Not
one word. All you see is just an empty hole in the wall with zip
in it. Annoyance would be the prime emotion here. Maybe even a dollop
of disappointment.
But what if you find out that all that airy space exists simply
because the post office decided to send all your mail back? Now
that would get you in a bit of a boil, wouldn't it? Frothing at
the mouth, wouldn't you want to tear all those bespectacled post
office workers into little
vulture-sized meat bites?
And then what if I told you that your email marketing business
is going the same way? What if you suddenly learned that the email
newsletters you'd subscribed to are now doing the boomerang dance?
What if you're an email marketer and your subscriber isn't even
getting your mail? What if he's just getting a stripped down version
of it?
Is that smoke coming out of your ears?
The Wild West Lives Again!
In the Wild West the rules were simple. If I didn't like you, I'd
shoot you. Email isn't dropping to the floor quite that quickly,
but there is a definite pattern evolving that you should be aware
of. Someone has put your email marketing on a poison drip, and by
golly, if you ignore it, you're one dead puppy! Read how Internet
Service Providers (ISPs) are systematically working to weed out
HTML mail and what you need to do to minimise your damage.
Who's Paying for Whose Fault?
Spammers are the baddies, and spammers don't care. Bandwidth can
span the breadth and depth of the Grand Canyon and it won't make
any difference to them. You can be sure they'll find a way to top
it up with their junk. It was also obvious, even several years ago,
that control of spammers was improbable. They know very well what
they are doing. All they have to do is go to an offshore provider
when anti-spam legislation is passed. What's to stop them? As long
as there is one country in the world that will allow spammers to
send their poison, they will.
Does anyone really believe that every ISP on the network is going
to spend the resources to closely examine the specific content of
each and every large-scale email transmission to see if it's okay
or not?
The answer has to be no, since this doesn't avoid the
cost of spam in the long term. It simply transfers it from a cost
of bandwidth to a cost of administration.
The harder commercial email pushes, the harder the network will
respond by pushing back. "Big" email is a lame duck --
and will soon be a stone cold dead one. Even with filters in place,
my email account bulges with mail I didn't ask for, and would never
reply to. ISPs (Internet Service Providers) on the other hand, are
watching this rainstorm with increasing concern. Every day, the
volume of email threatens to blow the dam, and they're not going
to sit back and take it.
How an ISP's Worry Becomes Your Headache
Bandwidth costs money. The more email you get and send, the more
it's costing your ISP. They can't charge you more (or may not want
to charge you), and so the easiest way out is to send your email
à la Elvis: Return to sender!
The biggest offender here is HTML email that clogs up the system
with a reasonable amount of imagery. It's the graphics that generates
business for you and me, but it's also this very factor that is
clogging up the pipe. This has led several ISPs to take some very
radical decisions that border on telling you what you can and cannot
read.
A Growing Menace Called Filters
Filters that are easy to implement seem to beat the system, so
that's the option that many ISPs consider first. In an attempt to
control the traffic, they simply install cheap and nasty systems
that send any mail that's considered 'spam' right back to where
it came from. This seems noble until you consider the following.
These filters may be stopping legitimate mail from entering your
mailbox.
If mom sent you a mail with a word which the filters pick up but
don't like: Bounce, bounce. It would go bouncing back! If you had
the word 'search engines' in it, maybe they'd decide that word signified
spam. Kaboom! It's back to where it came from. Suddenly, your business
that depends on the mail getting through is being vetted by an unasked
police patrol run by goons. You're not getting across to your customers,
and even worse, your customers' mail may not be reaching you.
What's worse is that as an email marketer, you would tend to take
for granted that you would get an "undeliverable" note
when this happens. I understand it's not always true; you can send
out thousands of messages and remain blissfully ignorant of their
eventual fate. Why HTML-Based Marketing Will Be Easier To Kill
Macromedia Flash went through a fashionable phase and had to be
dumped in favour of good ol' HTML. HTML, while great on the web,
is a pain in the neck in your inbox.
To counter this, many a software developer is seriously working
out ways to have HTML-like effects within your email without the
code and bandwidth that goes with it. This software, though available
today, is quite expensive and not a very viable option except for
larger companies. The rest of us have to contend with the inescapable
fact that any email over a certain size will be treated as an HTML
file and fair game for the intrepid filters to play 'shoot the ducky.'
HTML will always be bulky, and is already denied or stripped by
some carriers and destination ISPs, so it will always be a hazard.
Some companies and email marketers have decided they are cutting
out HTML altogether. It's too much of a risk when you don't even
know whether it's been dumped or stripped.
How Can You Go Past This 'Doomsday Scenario'?
Two possibilities: text and online HTML.
Text is faster, and has stood the test of time. But it's devoid
of colour and formatting -- and more tedious to read. The better
bet is to use HTML to link back to the website or online email newsletter.
Businesses that get their customers trained to fetch their newsletter
off the web will have fewer problems because they'll have few occasions
when they will have to send emails out to their customers -- and
then only very short notices or informative "drip feeds".
The kind of email you would then send would rarely have the kind
of signature that causes the spam filters to scream. Most of these
filters are weighted, and there are very few stand-alone telltales
that send email into instant oblivion.
My guess is that small emails, even if numerous, will escape filter
security, because it requires a certain minimum amount of text to
make a spam offer. Emails, smaller than this minimum will probably
not be checked at all, owing to sheer volume.
The Hero Doesn't Die In The End
The saddest part of this whole scenario is that people like you,
me and a dog named Spammer are all trying to achieve the same thing
-- bulk up the profits. And in doing so, we are all part of the
gloomy picture. But don't despair.
Unlike you, Mr Spammer doesn't want to be traceable. You do, because
you're legit. Make use of your legitimacy, and drive your customers
back to your online newsletter or website.
And simultaneously drive the spam merchant out of business!
If you haven't done so
already: 
(That's a clue!)
P.S. If you like this article,
feel free to share it with your own list, post it on your site, post it on your
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not alter it in anyway. All links must remain in the article.
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