Canadian Anti-spam Law on the way

On May 7th, 2008 The Senate of Canada had the First reading of Bill S-235, to be known as the Anti-Spam Act. Once I have time to fully digest this I'll post my thoughts on this, but to get you started the bill deals with four key items of note:

• Form and content requirements for commercial electronic messages
• prohibits address harvesting
• dictionary attacks
• and phishing.

Here is a link to the bill (PFD) that you can ready yourself. Please share your thoughts on this.

EEC: Good Intentions Gone Bad

Before you read remember this - I like the EEC, I like the things they do, and I like the people involved with running the organization. But this story goes to show even leaders make mistakes from time to time.

It started with an article from the EEC explaining their Earth day exercise, and what their intent was when they were sending these electronic Magazine messages to their members. Ken Magill, then followed up with a post stating that the EEC had spammed its members. Truly a case of "Good Intentions Gone Bad".

Here is my take on how it should have gone down...

• It should have been branded EEC, with the Magazine Content in the body of the message.
• The messages should have been sent "From" for the EEC, not the Zinio system
• There should not have been three copies, with two different content pieces, if this was a one off mailing.
• Messages should have been Gender neutral, or better targeted... Women's Magazines are just not my favorite reading choices. ;)
• If these are for Earth day and on behalf of the EEC - you should mention that in the content of the message somewhere (see below).
• While the intentions were good the execution get an "F" - as leaders these things should be checked and double checked before letting the message out the door.

Over at BeRelevant!, Tamara had this to say.

View the messages here:

1. First message - lacking Personalization (Dear Reader)
2. Second Message - Same as first (personalized this time), sent 3 hrs after first.
3. Third Message - New content

Yahoo Ticketing systems update

Received notice today that Yahoo's postmaster teams ticket queues have begun to clear and that the average response time, that has been experience over the last couple months (2 weeks), has returned to the normal 24 to 48 hours.

Remember - Provide as many of the details up front when opening a ticket with Yahoo's (or any ISP's) Postmaster team... This will help reduce resolution times and will accelerate the postmaster support teams investigations and applications, without needing to ask additional questions about your issues.

NOTE: This does not effect Feedback loop applications, they are still on hold at this time.

Alltop.com

Today, Emailkarma.net was added to the Marketing.alltop.com list.

What is Alltop you ask? The about pages describe it as:

You can think of an Alltop site as a “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points — they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. In this way, our goal is the “cessation of Internet stagnation.”

Check out other topics on Alltop like; Career, Beauty, Movies, Gaming, Twitterati

CMA | E-mail marketing not sophisticated despite popularity

Source: The CMA Weekly Watching Brief

A report released on Tuesday by Alterian finds that nearly two-thirds of marketers are only operating at a basic-to-immediate e-mail marketing level.

• More specifically, 32% were found to be operating at an advanced user level, putting them in a position to expand e-mail beyond traditional marketing use and fully leverage the channel as a strategic business application.
• Most participants (59%), fell into the intermediate user category; although their e-mail marketing programs are more advanced than most, these marketers can make many improvements to increase ROI and improve the customer experience.
• Four percent have not surpassed the basic user level, where they have just begun experiencing the power of e-mail marketing.

On a side note - Dave Fowler (a good friend) joins Alterian as Vice President of Deliverability and Privacy. Congrats Dave!