Gmail Spam False Positives

I have to read my spam folder daily, because it gets sometimes 200 spam email messages, and within that may be as many as 5% false positives.

These are emails I want to receive, which I have signed up to receive, I have confirmed a subscription with a full “double opt-in” process, and are from senders I previously had no problems receiving email from.

Some examples are occasional emails from list owners with Aweber – Aweber have only 100% clean opt-in email – if an email is sent from Aweber, I have asked for it, I want to read it, or keep it on file. It is not spam.
Even if a user reports an email from Aweber as spam, it isn’t spam – they should have to unsubscribe like normal people.

There are others, such as our good friends at ientry.com, responsible for WebProNews etc – I want their emails

In the past I have even had problems with my own contact form results ending up in SPAM, but here is the most unusual to date.

Yes that is an email from Google, actually a Google Alert in my spam folder in Gmail.

Advertising positioning

This one is a shout out for all the Awords advertisiers who want reduced click fraud and false clicks.

Maybe this is a rare occasion, but every now and then, especially when going along in a car on a bumpy road (they have bumpy roads here in Poland), I might accidentally click an advert and not the layer with the link to update the email thread.

I hate the thought of those clicks costing someone money.

If it was an Adsense advertisier with that positioning, Google wouldn’t be happy.

Update

It is worth checking out the full update on the Google Gmail blog, and Andy Beal has added a few different problems he encounters.

While you are over at Marketing Pilgrim, don’t forget to check out my competition entry if you missed it, or forgot to Stumble it.

Email is the de-facto master password for a huge swath of your online identity. Tread carefully:

* As a software developer, you should never ask a user for their email credentials. It’s unethical. It’s irresponsible. It is wrong. If someone is asking you to code this, why? For what purpose?
* As a user, you should never provide your email credentials to anyone except your email service. Sites that ask you for this information are to be regarded with extreme suspicion if not outright distrust.

This is the same terrible system used by many large social networks, and 2 scripts I recently strongly advised internet marketers not to use.

• Optin Accelerator – due to be relaunched soon
• Then there was Viral Optin Generator
• Coming soon is Viral Inviter which has some redeeming qualities, it works with old address books from Outlook etc, but it is still asking for highly personal passwords, and there are some other security faults.

Viral Inviter, with even heavier marketing and endorsements, will have a huge long-term negative effect on email marketing, with the rewards quickly being overtaken by a backlash of negative sentiment and poorer email delivery which will be universal.

Plurk which has very recently become very popular also suffers from this evil invite and finding friends method, but at least has a redeeming feature.

http://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&cmid=0&fs=1&su=Invitation+to+Plurk.com&body=I+have+been+using+Plurk+and+I+think+you+should+check+it+out%21%0A%0AAccept+my+invitation+by+going+to%3A%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fplurk.com%2FredeemByURL%3Ffrom_uid%3D15547%26check%3D-1998160234%26s%3D2%0A%0ACheck+out+my+profile+at%3A%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.plurk.com%2Fuser%2Fandybeard%0A%0APlurk.com+-+Your+life%2C+on+the+line&tearoff=1&shva=1&ui=1

http://compose.mail.yahoo.com/?Subj=Invitation+to+Plurk.com&Body=I+have+been+using+Plurk+and+I+think+you+should+check+it+out%21+Accept+my+invitation+by+going+to%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fplurk.com%2FredeemByURL%3Ffrom_uid%3D15547%26check%3D-1998160234%26s%3D2.+Check+out+my+profile+by+going+to%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fwww.plurk.com%2Fuser%2Fandybeard

http://www.hotmail.msn.com/secure/start?action=compose&subject=Invitation+to+Plurk.com&body=I+have+been+using+Plurk+and+I+think+you+should+check+it+out%21%0A%0AAccept+my+invitation+by+going+to%3A%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fplurk.com%2FredeemByURL%3Ffrom_uid%3D15547%26check%3D-1998160234%26s%3D2%0A%0ACheck+out+my+profile+at%3A%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.plurk.com%2Fuser%2Fandybeard%0A%0APlurk.com+-+Your+life%2C+on+the+line

That first line for instance brings up an invite email inside Gmail, no need to scrape Gmail contacts, and then you can use Gmail’s own address book to access contacts.

They also use Facebook

Existing APIs

Google Yahoo and Microsoft also have APIs for this kind of stuff which can also be used for finding friends.

Google Contacts API
Yahoo! Contact API
Windows Live Contact API

Over the last few months I have already taken the decision not to promote a number of sites and services launched by Internet Marketers using these dangerous scripts.

I have proven I can rank highly in the SERPs for any product. It is going to help conversions when on the first page of the SERPs for your product name potential customers find…

Product Name – WARNING: SECURITY RISK – Read This First!
or
Product Name by Marketer Name – Warning: Security Risk

The only problem is, this won’t be a typical fake affiliate promotion, but a real warning

Update

Tim has provided the code so that anyone who buys one of these viral tell a friend scripts can easily modify it so that it stores all the personal data entered in a form. It would take a typical script kiddie less than 2 minutes.

Doing it on someone else’s server is a little more work, plus they would need to get access, but how many people really think their websites running 3rd party scripts are totally secure.

Tim points out Paypal… how many marketers use Gmail for Paypal access, along with their Adwords, Adsense, Domain registrations etc. I know I do, because I trust Google with the data more than I trust my ISP – plus it would be a thankless task changing everything if you changed ISP.

Marketers are the perfect target

• Running lots of 3rd party scripts on a site
• Often running outdated versions of WordPress
• Have multiple sites on the same server
• Have a “set and forget” mentality

I have been using Twitter a little more than normal over the last week, maybe it will last. During that time I have been looking at the reliability of consuming Twitter content via various tools (no I haven’t tested everything).

Last night was actually a very good opportunity to do some data analysis, because Robert was very active on Twitter, with lots of updates in a very short period of time.

Could you follow the conversation on every platform?

Twitter Web Interface

The first interface I tested was the Twitter web interface.

I grabbed a screenshot of Robert’s twitter updates, and then went to my friends feed on Twitter to compare how many of Robert’s tweets actually made it to my Twitter Web page, to allow me to follow the conversation.

What I have done is highlighted in yellow the tweets that didn’t make it though to my feed.

4 out of 20 messages made it through to my Twitter home page “with friends”

20% Deliverability = Fail

FriendFeed

This is a slightly different situation to the main Twitter web interface, because of the clumping I previous objected to. They only pull some of the updates.

When you click on that huge lump of tweets you get something like this

I have used numbers to represent the order that the tweets were actually written, and you can see that they appear out of order on FriendFeed.
When grabbing the tweets in the clump, Friendfeed is able to make a specific call to retrieve Robert’s tweets for that time segment using the Twitter API, thus all the tweets appear.

To follow people who don’t tweet very often and to be sure that you see every one of their tweets, Friendfeed might actually be a better interface for twitter than twitter itself, if it wasn’t for the clumping of high activity.

If Twitter continue to only deliver 20% of tweets to other interfaces, it makes more sense to use Friendfeed, but reading them out of order, you might as well click through to Robert’s timeline on Twitter.

Tweets in clumps out of order = fail

Twhirl

I have been testing out Twhirl for a while, and used the same data to see what is picked up.

I haven’t used the same screenshot as for the web interface, and the data was compiled from my Twhirl history probably 3 hours later than the first screenshot.
You will see that Twirl again only has 4 out of 20 tweets

note: I only have Twhirl pulling in data 40 times per hour – as it is only pulling data that is the same as on the web interface, this isn’t an issue.

20% Deliverability = Fail

20% Delivery = Low Traffic

If you were using an email marketing solution, and it offered only a 20% chance of the message being delivered to your prospects’ email box, without allowing for open and CTR, it would be a major business liability.

What is the point of having 10,000+ Twitter followers if your messages are only going to be delivered to 20% of them?

In addition there is the problem that only a small percentage continue to use Twitter – heavy attrition.

Direct messages seem to be a lot more reliable, and I haven’t got the patience to manually determine if this deliverability affects people with less than 100 followers.

Twitter is not reliable, they just throttle the amount of updates you see

Update

A number of people have raised one issue with this post, the use of @

What is being filtered from what you receive are @ messages to people you are not following, but this isn’t a universal rule.

As an example, here is a tweet from Rob, Former Fat Guy to Chris Pirillo

I don’t follow Chris, maybe I should… but then I am only following just over 300 of the people who are following me – there are others I am not following, I am slowly increasing the people I follow, but priority is regular readers and commenters – my core audience.

For me seeing @ messages to people I might not be following is extremely important, as it plays a vital role in discovery of other friends using Twitter.

People use the @ reply mechanism to ensure that people who would be most interested in the tweet see it, not just as a reply in conversation.
They are not aware that by using @ they are also preventing, or reducing the number of other people the message will be sent to.

Just imagine Robert discovered through his Microsoft contacts that a Yahoo deal was finally on the table. Rather than use a normal tweet, he uses @techcrunch to make sure Michael Arrington sees it.
That would then potentially limit who sees that message to those following both Robert and Michael, plus an arbitrary number of additional random people who are just following Robert, or maybe none if there is some kind of threshold based on the number of people following both.

In direct referral stats it didn’t cause a shockwave until I looked at the specific pageviews of the page he chose to link to, my WordPress category.

My category pages rarely figure highly in the most viewed, so I could actually attribute the majority of the traffic to that specific landing page, even if the traffic originated from an email or RSS subscriber.

This takes me back to one of the discussions I had with Joost regarding his Google Analytics tracking from RSS Plugin – I am sure there must be some way to modify it so that when you link to someone, they can actually see the traffic you sent them, not just click-throughs from a blog page, but from subscribers.

This actually relates to link and traffic reciprocation, quite an important blogging concept.

People Need To See The Traffic

With an affiliate program it is easy for the affiliate program owner to see the traffic you send them. Everything is tracked. With blogging in general it isn’t so easy.

Search Engine Land for instance frequently link to me in their Search Cap which goes out to email subscribers.

From the posts that appear on the Search Engine Land blog, I rarely see more than 10 visitors – but that doesn’t account for the traffic sent from the email newsletter which is totally invisible.

Frequently I see posts receive a flood of traffic where I don’t have a referrer, because it is coming from various email clients.

Danny actually faces a similar problem, as he has raised the question of cross promotion of conferences in a discussion on Sphinn.

The big problem? The email edition of Search Cap is invisible traffic.

If people see that a link made a significant difference to traffic and conversions of whatever kind, they are much more likely to reciprocate.

In many ways, measurable traffic is the only traffic that counts and where you are promoting someone else, they have to see it too.

To be fair, I reached these conclusions more than 6 months ago… but saying anything at the time really would have fallen on deaf ears. I needed to have an established audience created in a traditional way, without any “explosive” growth from gaming social media, paid advertising or leveraging existing traffic.

• It would have been looked on as moaning and whining
• I would be told that you can’t expect instant success from blogging
• That you have to write better content to be successful
• The only blogs that gain lots of traffic and subscribers write list posts and have great headlines
• You have to optimize your monetization to make any money online

However ultimately everything comes down to one thing…

Blogs Suck For Lead Acquisition

• The number of editorial links you receive is generally related to the number of subscribers
• The number of repeat visitors to a blog is generally related to the number of subscribers
• The amount of money a blog can make is generally related to the number of subscribers
• The prominence of a blog on social news sites is at least partly related to the number of subscribers

So to get more links, visitors, money and possibly even success on social news sites, you need to optimize your visitor experience with one single aim, to get more qualified subscribers

Here is a little test for you, lets look on this as a group project.

1. No. of New Visitors During Last Month

In Google Analytics I know that I have had around 20,000 unique visitors that Google Analytics looks on as new visitors during the last month. Whilst this figure is fairly inaccurate, at least it is “constantly inaccurate”, so we can use it as some kind of reference point for the future.
In Google Analytics it is also possible to segment the new visitors by the source of traffic. I still gain more traffic from Google search than I receive from social media such as StumbleUpon, in fact 32% of my new visitors are from search, and that traffic is generally highly targeted.

2. Subscriber Gain or Decline During Last Month

Go into Feedburner or your other feeds stats, and work out how many subscribers you have gained or lost during the last month. Feedburner numbers can fluctuate a little, so go for an intelligent average.

Over the last month I know that I have gained around 400 subscribers

3. Compare New Visitors To Subscribers

Based on my data:-

(400/20000)*100 = 2%

2% doesn’t sound very good, it almost certainly isn’t very good, though the figure is probably a little on the low side. Many of those “new visitors” could well have been previous visitors.

At the same time, many of those subscribers could well have been repeat visitors.

2% Subscription Rate Sucks…
But Is Yours Any Better?

If you had traffic coming to a sales page, you might be happy with a 2% conversion rate… though you would obviously strive for more.

If you are offering totally free content of high quality, you should expect a much higher subscription rate unless your conversion of traffic into subscribers totally sucks, and lets be honest, mine currently does, and there is a high chance your’s does as well.

This isn’t a problem with blogs as such, as blogging software is really just a content management system.

Blogging and joining the conversation is important

It is very rare to see a blog that has a highly optimized traffic funnel, in fact I have seen some marketing blogs advocate what is effectively the exact opposite of an efficient sales funnel. For some silly reason they advocate advertising to new visitors, and switching off selling to people who have subscribed.

People who subscribe are your hot prospects, and if you don’t sell them something, they will most likely buy from someone else. If they buy from someone else, you have lost a customer

There are factors that might give some “abnormalities” to the overall statistics, such as a newly launched resource with plenty of traffic leverage from friends, affiliates or social media, and an efficient traffic funnel can change things dramatically.
Older blogs that are reaching a saturation point within their niche might have a reduced rate of subscription.

Blogs that can leverage “fake” subscriptions by frequent discussion of competing RSS readers and aggregators probably have a higher subscription rate than their real “responsive” numbers. I know my own numbers aren’t too far off because the occasional “hit” such as my article on “Linking Abuse” was read by 90% of my subscribers based on Feedburner usage statistics.

Email subscriptions for 3rd party blogs are hard to quantify if they are not reported to Feedburner.

So what is your subscription conversion rate of new visitors for your blog?

Sometimes there are people you just want to link through to as part of the conversation, sometimes you want to link through to someone as some kind of reciprocation, and sometimes you link purely for selfish gain.

First of all I would like to congratulate Todd And on his deal with Advertising Age – I have actually twice thought about applying for the list, but I don’t think I have ever hit the submit button.
I always wanted enough multimedia elements on the page – graphics, video and sound to max out on those “And Points” and despite logo designers complementing me on my logo design occasionally, I know my overall design will eventually have to have the rough surface polished, after a heavy site structure revamp.

So where would I be on the list currently? (figuratively speaking if I did apply)

Pagerank 5
Bloglines 147 – 11 points, just shy of a 12
Technorati Rank 1445 – I think that is 27 points without publishing themes
Todd And Points – How can I judge?

Here are the criteria:-

Todd And Points (1 to 15) – As the only subjective measure in the Power 150 algorithm, 1 to 15 opinion points were assigned to each blog. Todd And values frequent, relevant, creative and high-quality content. The use of audio, video and graphics is also heavily weighted in the Todd And Points.

I do use video on occasion, most often when talking about Jason Calacanis, or Rich Schefren

Graphics use? I use them most when talking about SEO

I do publish relatively frequently, everything else is subjective.
I am going to give myself a 12 just because I am biased, and because Todd has given so many of my readers a 13 ;)

Total: 5+11+27+12 = 55

That would place me somewhere between 35th and 41st and among some great company.

But the list is a little bit subjective

It is almost totally devoid of affiliate, niche and “internet” marketers, and I hope that will become something that changes over time.
I don’t mean any disrespect to Todd in that statement because I think he has had his hands fairly full managing the list he currently has.

Another major problem comes from metrics as in many fields of marketing “reach” is calculated not just on Bloglines subscribers. I am sure if reach included Email subscribers I wouldn’t appear in the top500.

RSS To Email Services Currently Suck For Marketing

First of all I would like to point out I haven’t explored every avenue yet, and have mainly concentrated on the cheaper options.

I don’t want to host email delivery on my own domain, so I am forgetting about plugins for now. I certainly don’t want to have to manually handle bounces, it is bad enough for comment subscriptions.

• Feedburner – whilst the delivery rate is great, there is no way to give incentives for signing up. That is vital, because unfortunately email subscription confirmation is only hovering above 60%. As I pointed out when they were taken over by Google, legal compliance is borderline for commercial email.
• Zookoda – The delivery options are great for a free service, but it isn’t a “marketing tool” where you can easily migrate list members around. They have their own counter for subscribers, but it would be nice if they reported numbers to feedburner. I have seen discussion regarding poor delivery, but nothing confirmed and haven’t done any testing.
• Feedblitz – Actually Feedblitz might not suck, especially their new(ish) Newsletter Edition – they have been working on their delivery a lot recently, and it will be interesting how easy it would be to move over from Feedburner.
  They are not cheap compared to many high volume “marketing” email providers, but possibly an option.
• Getresponse – I hate seeing “I have just updated my blog” emails from Getresponse users, knowing that what blog readers really want is full content. The Getresponse emails don’t even link through to the permalink. Come on Simon, you guys can do better than that. Getresponse also don’t report email subscribers to Feedburner (which could be optional)
• Aweber – Aweber can send RSS > Email immediate broadcasts, and can send updates after so many posts, but from what I can see they don’t support the ability to schedule an email at the same time every day containing all the posts for a single day. They also don’t report subscribers to Feedburner to my knowledge.

Ideally I want these services to also handle all my comment subscriptions in some way, not only providing a delivery via SMTP, but also managing bounces.

this isn’t a conclusive list of email service providers, I will keep looking.

Sometime over the next few days I will make a decision which service I will go for. Most likely is unfortunately Aweber… because support for Aweber is also provided by membership site software that I intend to use, but I could possibly also explore the other services depending on how they can handle subscription requests.

Check out Todd’s full list of Marketing Blogs

I will leave the community of anyone who uses the mass broadcast feature

A few people have played around with it, fair enough, but this is going to be abused to hell.

What I should really do is mass mail links to promote Rich Schefren’s Ebok, but I would look on that as spam, even if technically you might have subscribed to my “mailing list” when you clicked the button to join my community… not!

The mass mail feature is sending emails by default, and thus is subject to CAN-SPAM – if you send commercial messages you really should include your physical address or a P.O. box.

As Robyn says

Of course, some members may get a little message happy, but again, any spam moderation on this feature is up to you. Spam is in the eye of the beholder, or something like that, so if you are receiving spam, just leave the person’s community by clicking Leave Community on their community’s page.

The spammers will end up with a community of spammers not reading the messages. With spam being delivered by email, it is not in the eye of the beholder, but in the eye of the law.

I repeat
I will leave the community of anyone who uses the mass broadcast feature

Why isn’t there an option to turn off broadcast messages? (only)

Tagging of Content

Great… MyBlogLog now pick up all the tags from my content and display it along with a snippet.

So where would a click on “blogging tips” lead me?

There is some kind of weird cross-over happening where clicking on a tag in the content leads to a tag that represent bloggers, just like the tags in the section above.
If you haven’t tagged yourself for every topic your blog represents, you would effectively be driving traffic away from your blog.

I liked the idea (other than schmoe and the spam) that community members to tell other visitors what my blog was about, and it was interesting watching how people were using tagging to classify my site.

Tags from my content should lead to aggregated content from my blog, or possibly other blogs in my community – or even MyBlogLog as a whole.

Currently using tagging extensively in MyBlogLog drives traffic away with no reciprocal return of traffic, not even a trickle, unless you manually tag yourself.

There could at least have been some buttons added next to the tags in the content snippets to suggest adding them for the blog as well.

More on the MyBlogLog new features such as tagging and the messaging.

MyBlogLog have now introduced a suggestion board where people can suggest features. I am sorry but I have tried using the same suggestion board for Yahoo Pipes, and found it next to useless as there is no way to reach a consensus suggested by Wendy before the content just disappears. It is also almost impossible to monitor conversations, or discover if something is already suggested.
I made one suggestion for Yahoo Pipes and it was almost impossible to find my own suggestion a week later. That was among a geeky knowledgeable user base.

Now some people think I am full of crap talking about how insanely well a massive amount of tagging works, but please take a look at the number of indexed pages on Bumpzee, a network with 3000 members, and over 300,000 pages in the main Google index, and almost no supplemental results.

I love the fact that MyBlogLog is providing a listing of my content to improve the value of my MyBlogLog community page, but I would also like them to be storing an index of my content, and linking through to it with the tags, so that just like on my blog, the links help people find information (either on my blog or someone elses), and not just a link to a blogger profile, and their home page.

Update: Posts On the Issue

Meg slammed MBL and is also looking to leave the communities of spammers. It must be a real nightmare for people who don’t use an email client that stacks emails.

Rob thinks it sucks

When active supports who normally give constructive feedback are so vocal about something, you know something isn’t quite right.
The MBL team are going to be busy sorting this out Monday onwards

More MyBlogLog discussion on Avinash and he is compiling a list of all posts discussing the situation for the next few days so worth returning to.

Specific Disclosure: I have been providing a lot of free ideas and feedback both publicly and in private to the 3 main (imho) competitors in this niche, MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, and Blogcatalog, and all 3 would probably look on me as one of their largest supporters, in spirit if not in traffic (I can’t compete with Techcrunch).
With Blogcatalog I have to note that the arrangements are now slightly more formal in a consultancy capacity from which I may receive financial compensation

We are pleased to inform you of the result of the just concluded annual
final draws held on (20th March,2007) by Coca-Cola in conjunction
with the British American Tobacco Worldwide Promotion.Your email was
among the 20 Lucky winners who won £1,000,000.00{One Million Great
Britain Pounds} each in the THE COCA COLA COMPANY 2007 PROMO.

Notice the disjunction?

Why would Coca Cola who like to promote a healthy image associate anything to do with British American Tobacco, who as the company name implies make Tobacco products that generally carry a heath warning?
Admittedly some would argue that Coca Cola should also carry a health warning, but are the spammers just totally stupid?

I have always been attracted to the Subscribe-to-Comments plugin, but at the same time installing it has always filled me with dread. Whilst it can be a great community building aid, and a useful tool for regular visitors who like to interact, it can be a liability.

There are 2 aspects of subscribe to comments that present a danger to a successful business blog

• Email Flow Control
• Legal compliance with CAN SPAM and SI (3429 of 2006)

Email Flow Control

By default, the wp_mail() function of WordPress uses PHPs mail() function, a way of sending instant emails from your server. Unfortunately, most popular hosts have restrictions on how many emails can be sent from your server over 24hrs, and it is very typical for there to be an hourly limit as well.
As an example, here are the Hostgator policy for email delivery:-

There is a 200 hourly email limit per domain this limit is also applied towards mailman. If you send over this amount in any hour most of the e-mails will bounce back with a undeliverable error.

They also suggest one email every 6 seconds – unfortunately if 50 people have subscribed to comments, one new comment sends 50 emails out, which in my opinion is quite worrying.

Most hosts have PHPMailer installed, or available for installation, and you could try your luck using wpPHPmailer plugin, though this seems to be unsupported these days (1 year+ and no reply from developer in the support thread) – support for PHPMailer has actually just been added to WPMU. PHPmailer itself hasn’t been updated in a long time, thus I am slightly hesitant to use it, though I am not technical enough to give a reason for my pessimistic stance.

Swift Mailer & the ShiftThis SMTP Mailer Plugin are the alternative that we are going to use instead, and both are actively supported.

ShiftThis SMTP Mailer Plugin

Installing this plugin is actually extremely easy, as long as you don’t disappear off in the wrong direction. The plugin comes with Swift Mailer already in a sub-folder.
You don’t need to visit the Swift Mailer site at all. If you are not extremely technical, you could waste hours, if not days digging around the Swift Mailer site, and then the the various testing applications. None of that is needed.

Installation:

Download plugin
Extract plugin
Copy / Upload to your normal plugin folder

Configuration:

You could set it up to use your local SMTP server – that would then however count towards how many emails you are sending from your domain, which might not be an ideal situation.

You could also set things up to use Gmail – I can actually think of all kinds of benefits to using Gmail for your SMTP, though if a site is a company site, you might want to use one of the upgraded Google offerings. Also take a look at this old Lifehacker article. You will also have to decide whether you really want your sent email within Gmail to fill up with comments being posted to your blog.

Currently the code doesn’t seem to support the email flow control plugin of Swift Mailer, but if you are using Gmail for SMTP this might not be a problem. I have submitted a message on the support forums to see if this can be integrated with some easy to understand flow controls.

Legal compliance with CAN SPAM and SI (3429 of 2006)

I should note:-

• I am not a lawyer, and the wording I have used was not written by a lawyer
• You should check with your legal consultant and this is provided for entertainment purposes only

No matter how effective your spam controls and how restrictive your comments policy, commercial email messages can get through, and a subscribed email recipient could just as easily claim “this is spam” for a comment subscription as they would for a mailing list.

It is quite common for people engaged in internet marketing to use an email service such as Get Response or Aweber to ensure delivery of their emails, and to protect against spam complaints.

This solution isn’t necessarily going to help with email delivery, but at least offer some “cover your a$$” protection should you happen to receive a complaint.

Whilst elsewhere I have been challenged to provide conclusive proof that you should take precautions with any aspect of your email usage, I am not going to offer that in this write up.
You may well look on this as scare tactics and FUD.

It is your choice based on your own research and the legal advice you have received whether you think emails being sent from your domain which are not totally under your control could represent a problem.
I honestly don’t know if Safe Harbour rules might apply to email delivery. I don’t know of any blog owner who has had problems either from a legal perspective, or with their hosting or domain registrars, but then I personally only know a few people who have been killed in car accidents – I know a lot more people who drive cars than publish business blogs.

Subscribe To Comments Hack

This is just a hack. I decided to offer a hack for those concerned and don’t intend to offer a patched file. Ideally Subscribe To Comments should offer an interface in the options to allow various additional messages to be added to outgoing email messages. This wouldn’t necessarily just have to be legal information, it could also include additional advertising.

Around line 600 I have added the following:-

[PHP]
$message .= __(“\n\nWarning: Emails generated from comment subscriptions may contain commercial messages. Whilst every attempt has been taken to eliminate comment spam, the content should not be regarded as approved by the blog owner\n”, ‘subscribe-to-comments’);
$message .= __(“Keedz Ltd – Registered in England & Wales: 05906883\n”, ‘subscribe-to-comments’);
$message .= __(“Registered Address: 71 Bexley High St, Bexley, Kent DA5 1AA +48(62)7382438\n”, ‘subscribe-to-comments’);
[/PHP]

Conclusion

As stated this is all for entertainment purposes.

If you are concerned with emails being sent out from your blog, and how they are controlled, making these changes might take you anywhere from 1 to 2 hours. Once you get the hang of it, making the changes on multiple blogs will take just a few minutes, especially if you create a hacked version of the plugin that is suitable for all your web properties.

My own personal belief is it is worth dotting the legal “i”s, and crossing the “t”s if you are serious about your online business. I still have a few I need to handle.

Maybe one day the email mailing list services will offer a host of additional services for bloggers, including adding commenters to mailing lists and providing a safe, monitored email gateway.

Here is a little bug I picked up today that I found interesting.

As far as I can see, in my own CSS code I close all the divs correctly.

A bonus I intended to exploit was the way the Feedburner Feed Flares will wrap around my byline on the right hand side.
To ensure this worked in more feed readers, I intended to make my byline slightly smaller, however this bug I have just found in Feedburner might prevent that.

When you read a blog in a Feed Reader, each individual blog page is seperate, wrapped in its own divs so that the content on one page doesn’t attempt to wrap around the content on another.
It seems that in emails that are generated by Feedburner, each individual post is not separated correctly, thus one entry can wrap around a page element in the previous post for some strange effects.

I am thinking about ways I can fix this in my own CSS, or with a custom feed flare, but the more I think about it, the more I am inclined to think that this is something that needs to be fixed on the Feedburner side.
It is good that the Feedflare units are fluid, and can wrap around objects. It is something you could prevent if you wanted to.