I do a lot of local speaking here in Phoenix where we have decided to settle for now.

So I get a lot of email from the MeetUp groups I participate in. But today one of my favorite MeetUps just really demonstrated with is wrong with most small emailers and I just have to share that with you for your own good.

If you are in the Phoenix area I highly recommend Club Entrepreneur. It is a great home for networking, the main floor holds up to 150 seats for public speaking, conference rooms and office space abounds as well. This is a great entrepreneurial setting for any business.

What they lack are Internet Marketing skills.

So here is the list of their mistakes. Are you making these bad moves too?

• Putting HTML in the text box…
• Putting text in the HTML box…
• Using a free email address in the from field
• Sending email from a social site that gets filtered easily
• Creating multiple social groups and double emailing
• Using digest emails with little focus
• All of the Above…

Here’s the details of the mistakes made by my friends at Club E (short for Club Entrepreneur).

Putting text in the HTML box…

I see major Internet marketers make this mistake all the time. In AWeber in the broadcast and the autoresponder interface there are two textareas that you can enter text in.

One is designated HTML and one is designated text. The HTML box is at the top of the AWeber interface, the text box is below that. Do not accidentally enter plain text in the HTML box by mistake. Your links will not be clickable in Outlook or other email clients as in my Outlook screen shot below.

You may not be catching this mistake if you are sending test emails to a web mail or free email browser account.

Solution: Always test your emails first both in a web client and always in Outlook.

Click image to see full size.

Using a free email address in the from field

It is the reply to field that is the problem here. Free email addresses set off spam filters, proven fact.

Set all your email distribution settings to the main account on your domain. That way you can set all accounts to one reply to address and control where replies are going to. Don’t spray replies to your emails all over the web on free accounts. You email replies are your best source of feedback, sales, clients and return traffic.

Either that or use the default for a social site like MeetUp, so the reply address is their domain. Never ever use a free email address as the reply to or from field. Why? Because it is what spammers do. Look at any spam you receive and it will almost always come from a free email address in the from field and or the reply to address.

Click image to see full size.

Sending email from a social site that gets filtered easily

Most users manage their lists thru MeetUp.com. The bad news is that most groups manage their email lists thru MeetUp.com. Tons of spam posts get posted to MeetUp boards and the default settings on any MeetUp group sends and email to the group members. So, I am guessing that the spam button gets clicked a lot.

Solution: Get members of MeetUp into your main site’s autoresponder. Howie Schwartz said it first and best: “Drag your followers on the social site out and into your own autoresponder”…

Creating multiple social groups and double mailing

My Friends at Club E have two different MeetUp groups. That means to mail all the members they have to double email. That creates confusion and double mailings at the members inbox many times within minutes of each other. Bad idea, avoid this at all costs.

Solution: Mail well in advance, and if you have multiple groups don’t mail them all on the same day within a few minutes of each other. Craft unique emails for each group and for your list.

Using digest emails dilutes the focus and lessens return

Lastly, if you look at the emails above, they are digest emails. Digest emails suck when it comes to getting your subscribers to do what you want. In fact, digest emails cause confusion, get caught in filters because spam many times has tons of links and usually perform poorly.

I suggest sending digest emails on the front end if you must, then send follow up emails that are focused on one action you want the members of your list to take.

All of the Above…

Let’s hope you are not making these kind of errors in your email marketing. If you are then you really need to learn how to “Get It To The Inbox” now more then ever.

What do you think? Tell us!

Let me know in the comments below. I want to hear from you, your best practices and what has failed and what has succeeded for you in the comments section below.

Links to your creatives are welcome below. Don’t be shy!

This is an excerpt from my social marketing members only site. This is the kind of thinking and leading edge use of GFC you will find there.

This one should really blow your socks off. Google Friend Connect and the Google friends list in Gmail is not a friends list. It is a spam filter. Stay with me here this is really good stuff…

There are four levels of spam filtering in Gmail.

• Sites we have joined thru the Google Friend Connect widget.

 

• Sites you have not joined.




• Gmail users not listed in your contacts.




• Gmail users who are listed in contacts and friends lists in Gmail.




• Those that are listed in Chat.




• Those listed in Google Latitude.

Thinking about Google the other day and the fact that I get so little spam that this just rolled right in. Many of you have followed me for a while now and you remember back to when a mistaken Trend Micro false positive destroyed my business.

What I never explained is that my Google friends list as well as my social contacts in Facebook are what saved me. The only reason I continued to deliver email to anyone was thru my Gmail friends list. Because I was a very early adopter of Google Friend Connect and was out to build a list in Gmail early on, I had many mutual friends in the eyes of Google.

When you become mutual friends in any of the Google applications: GFC widgets, Gchat, Google Lattitude, you are automatically added, your Gmail address that is, to each other’s Gmail contacts list.

Now as a social marketer, I think that is cool, however from an email standpoint, getting your email to the Inbox is how you make money. What easier way is there than getting you visitors to friend you thru a GFC widget?

Then Google does you work for you! There is also no whitelisting process for email delivery in Gmail and no public FBL (feed back loop) for receiving spam button click complaints. These are the basic necessities we use as emailers to keep getting our email delivered.

Google has replaced this process by using levels of trust. I am just theorizing here so I cannot say this is fact and we will never know if it is.

Google levels of trust

Level of trust #1.Let’s say you have joined my site thru the GFC widget on your right. Then Google would definitely deliver email from that site to your Gmail inbox. Since it was YOU who established the relationship.

Level of trust #2. Let’s say that you and I are mutual friends made through GFC and now have each others address in our Gmail contacts. I would say our emails to each other would definitely get delivered.

Level of trust #3. Let’s say that I have sent you a chat invitation and you have accepted and we now both show in each others chat widget. I would say this is an even higher indicator that our emails to each other should go directly to the Inbox.

Level of trust #4. Let’s say you have sent me a Google Latitude request and you and I now share our locations at what ever level in Google Latitude. I would hazard to say that our emails are DEFINITELY going to land in each others Inbox at this point.

Can you see how Google is using what normally is a social site to better deliver what we want all want? I don’t know about you but I want NO SPAM and I want my EMAIL NOW, not after searching the spam folder for an hour.

This only happens when you use a Gmail address. You only get the advantage of these social features when you use a Gmail address to log into Google applications like Google Lattitude. So go get one. If you do not understand how to set up Google Friend Connect properly you can get my FREE Google Friend Connect Tutorial here and watch my Google Friend Connect YouTube Channel here.

Trend Micro will block your site in the browser, block your web traffic at the server level, your URLs in any emails and send your emails to the Trend Micro spam folder if you make the mistakes that I did. It was not Trend Micro’s fault, my payment software or anything I did. Trend Micro blocked me because I was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

NOTE: This is NEW information that no one else has. Read this thourghly!

When Trend Micro blocked my site

In September Jennifer Horowitz sent a recommendation of my product, Social Marketing book to her email list. We had a very poor response rate and and I began to think her email was not getting past spam filters.

Then one of her subscribers sent me this screen shot of Trend Micro wrongly blocking my site.

Click the image to see it full size, this will shock you.

I was stupid enough to ignore this and simply believed it was a very minor issue due to the redirect to PayPal in my payment software. Big mistake. More like a $20,000 mistake.

Trend Micro is currently the most purchased Window software there is as reported by Cnet just last week.

As time went by it got WAY worse. More and more payment attempts were being abandoned and comments on my blog and email click thru rates plummeted. Two three week periods passed without a sale and I began to really worry. At the same time my mind really went to work on this.

Meanwhile I was using all the skills I have to track down what I believed was a new spam filter blocking my emails. I enlisted the aid of even more experienced email pros to help me and they could not find the source. Neither could my GoDaddy host or AWeber, my email list provider. No bounce messages, no FBL reports, no nothing.

That was when I began to think it was a client side spam filter and something new to boot.

Then about a week ago I remembered the screen shot, in the end that Trend Micro blocking screen shot was my savoir.

Trend Micro says keywebdata.com and Chris Lang are innocent of any phishing, undesirable, dangerous or malicious activity or wrong doing.

This is the email I received back today.

Below is the synopsis of what the next phone conversation produced. I want to stress that these are facts as told to me by my Trend Micro contact in charge of the team that investigated the keywebdata.com blocking.

Why did Trend Micro block my site and how can you avoid it

First off the best indicator of something going on are subscribers clicking the spam button in web email. Why are they doing that? Because they just saw a big freakin huge banner like the screen shot above. What else are they going to do when their anti virus software just screamed and yelled at them to never go to your site again?

After 8 straight days of working 20 hours a day, today, October 27th, I have gotten to the bottom of why Pc Cillin warnings were displayed and Trend Micro Internet Security and Trend Micro anti virus blocked my site.

I just got off the phone with my Trend Micro contact.

Keywebdata.com was flagged in the browser, in Internet Explorer 6 or 7 and blocking began.

At that point my site and payment forms were reviewed by Trend Micro.

Due to a unsecured form, submitting to my server, then redirecting to a PayPal CGI bin URL my site was deemed indicative of a Phishing site and blocking occurred.

This did create global blocking of my domain at both the server level and the end users of all Trend Micro Internet Security products.

Any email with my URL in it was blocked by TM and possibly Yahoo, Gmail and Microsoft, both at the browser and email server level.

Also any web traffic passing through a data center with Trend Micro filtering software installed would have blocked the traffic right there too. This may be why so many of my emails never arrived.

Any http request from a browser resulted in the screen shot image being displayed.

Any traffic crossing the Trend Micro server level software resulted in the request not being passed and the request to my server was not completed. In other words if a link to my site was clicked it would not result in the request either going thru to my server and no HTML would be displayed.

No footprint of this blocking is visible in server logs because the http request (http link click) was denied at either the home user end client or at the server leval. So, even if you do pull your server logs there is not footprint to show that you are serving lots of pages and getting no browser page views.

It would do no good to pull server logs because no request for a page would ever make it to the server.

Trend Micro is looking into if they will release numbers as to the end user blocking numbers for keywebdata.com

Basically I am going to have to pick myself up, dust myself off, learn from this and move the heck on.

TM does agree and is willing to suggest that using any HTML form that is submitting to any payment provider without using HTTPS protocols will draw the ire of anti phishing software. This also means Microsoft Internet Explorer anti phishing filters.

What can you do if Trend Micro PC Cillin blocks your site?

Step #1

First of all, I now have extreme knowledge of this and can check your site to see if it is blocked. Just send me and email, contact Chris Lang, or pick up the phone and call me I will run you thru the database. There in no public database to check for your domain, but I can take care of that for you.

If you are being blocked I can navigate thru the process of getting and investigation started and if you are innocent, get the blocking removed. Do not email me to death just to see if the site is blocked. If you experiencing problems I will help you.

Step #2

First of all, stop sending any emails with your domain URLs in it, don’t send any email to your email lists and pull access to any payment forms.

If someone tries to buy and gets a phishing warning you have just lost any possibility of a future sale.

If your list gets an email from you and anyone has seen the phishing warning on a previous visit you can bet your last dollar they are going to mark your email as spam and any others they may get.

Lost sales now are nothing compared to losing most of your list and further email blocking. I did not catch this early enough on and lost a list with 2500 hard earned subscribers on it.

Currently there is no feedback loop from Trend Micro and my contacts tell me they are considering adding this so that we are directly contacted should a new script on our site suddenly trip a Trend Micro red flag.

You will also want to keep your hosting provider in the loop so that there are no issues with your domain or site. Call them and create a help desk case number. Then email the abuse@YOUR HOSTING address and document every step of the way using the case number. It can come in handy if anyone sends false accusations their way.

Save every email, document everything and keep records of everything that occurs.

Step #3

If you are using payment forms generated by IPN scripts that submit to PayPal for payment then get them changed to using HTTPS protocols in the form tag. Don’t worry about forms created by PayPal, they are sending to PayPal URLs. The problem lies in forms that submit to your domain and then the server redirects to PayPal. That is what started my tale of woe.

You will need to add a SSL certificate to your site and your host can take care of this for you. Just give them a call.

Step #4

Then we will need to get Microsoft, Yahoo and Gmail to remove any blocking as well.

I can get this underway for you as well.

Step #5

Once you get this cleared up and your site free of any negative indicators you can resume mailing to your list and you should be in good shape. I am.

I do want to thank Paul Myers who kept me calm and supplied great ideas to get through out this. Above all he told me to handle myself professionally and calmly.

I want to thank John McGowan who dealt with the yelling and screaming portion of this little odyssey.

I also want to thank my friend Boomhauer for dragging me out of the house and getting me out from behind the keyboard and listening to all my talk of what could be going on.

Since the delete button is only a quarter inch from the spam button, I, in a hurry I clicked the wrong one. I had just marked my own message as spam.

I wonder how many times that happens by mistake to our emails. What do you think?

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The Virginia Supreme Court declared the state’s anti-spam law unconstitutional Friday and reversed the conviction of a man once considered one of the world’s most prolific spammers.

The court unanimously agreed with Jeremy Jaynes’ argument that the law violates the free-speech protections of the First Amendment because it does not just restrict commercial e-mails — it restricts other unsolicited messages as well. Most other states also have anti-spam laws, and there is a federal CAN-SPAM Act as well, but those laws apply only to commercial e-mail pitches.

The Virginia law ”is unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails, including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Justice G. Steven Agee wrote.

Agee wrote that ”were the Federalist Papers just being published today via e-mail, that transmission by Publius would violate the statute.” Publius was the pseudonym used by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay in essays urging ratification of the Constitution.

”In my view, the case was never about Jeremy Jaynes — it was about the First Amendment,” said Jaynes’ attorney, Thomas M. Wolf. ”The argument was never that there’s a constitutional right to send commercial spam. It was that the government cannot criminalize the sending of noncommercial e-mail for political and religious purposes, and that is what this statute did.”

Lawyers for the state had argued that the First Amendment doesn’t apply because the Virginia law bars trespassing on privately owned e-mail servers through phony e-mail routing and transmission information. The court rejected that characterization of the law.

Attorney General Bob McDonnell said he was ”deeply disappointed” and vowed to take the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court.

”Jeremy Jaynes used the private property of Internet service providers to defraud individuals worldwide,” McDonnell said. ”This was not a matter of free speech, it was fraud. Virginia acted appropriately to use this new law to put an end to this criminal behavior.”

John Levine, a board member of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail and one of the state’s expert witnesses in the Jaynes case, said he too was disappointed, but added that the ruling won’t have broad repercussions because Virginia is the only state that prohibits noncommercial spam.

”I don’t see it as a fatal setback for anti-spam law,” Levine said.

In 2004, Jaynes became the first person in the country to be convicted of a felony for sending unsolicited bulk e-mail. Authorities claimed Jaynes sent up to 10 million e-mails a day from his home in Raleigh, N.C. He was sentenced to nine years but is currently serving time in federal prison for an unrelated securities fraud conviction unrelated to the Virginia case, Wolf said.

Jaynes was charged in the spam case in Virginia because the e-mails went through an AOL server there.

The Virginia Supreme Court last February affirmed Jaynes’ conviction on several grounds but later agreed, without explanation, to reconsider the First Amendment issue. Jaynes was allowed to argue that the law unconstitutionally infringed on political and religious speech even though all his spam was commercial.

Wolf said sending commercial spam is still illegal in Virginia under the federal CAN-SPAM Act. However, he said the federal law does not apply to Jaynes because it was adopted after he sent the e-mails that were the basis for the state charges.

I recently ran across a post that claimed that by adding the SPF records of the writers autoresponder (in this case AWeber) that he expected to get past being blocked by a Canadian ISP. This is complete crap because any authentication technology associates the email in question with the sending domain and IP address not the email from address or the return email address.

I even contacted AWeber’s CEO Tom Kulzer with this scenario just to be absolutely sure and here is the email excerpt.

Chris Lang wrote:

Let’s say that an ISP receives my email from AWeber with my from address and reply address in the header. Do they look at my SPF record to see if I have a SPF DNS entry associated with your (my autoresponder) email servers?

Tom Kulzer said

They look at aweber.com SPF records.

Chris:

Also is all email sent from AWeber under the address keywebdata (at) aweber.com sent from the same IP address everytime?

Tom Kulzer:

It’s not sent from the same single IP, but load balanced across the same range of IP addresses. Those ranges can all be found in our SPF record directly or in our FAQ on the website.

Chris:

In other words does it matter if authentication records associate my domain and from address with yours?

Tom:

Does sending from the same single IP matter? No.

Does sending from the same group of IP’s matter that have an excellent reputation and reliable volume of mail built over a long period of time matter? Absolutely, yes.

Chris:

Also is there any data to support a higher delivery rate due to the use of SPF, Sender Id and DKIM?

Tom:

Not that I’ve seen which clearly shows this, but general industry knowledge of how various ISP’s build reputations
of senders and make delivery choices tells me it does help support higher delivery rates.

Chris:

Tom you have been a wealth of information on email delivery to us all many times, I just want to thank you again for taking time away from your business to set us straight.

• An email recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her email address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply email message or visiting a single Web page to opt out of receiving future email from a sender.

• The definition of “sender” was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements.

• A “sender” of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under U.S. Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a “valid physical postal address.”

• A definition of the term “person” was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.

You can read the full CAN SPAM FTC press release here.

If you have ever wondered how blogs get those cool Technorati buttons on their site, here it is.

Create a log in, or log in to Technorati, then go thru the “claim blog” process. Once you are done it will provide you with the code to add the buttons to your site.

Hope this helps! = Chris Lang

Yeah, I hate to tell you but your email delivery is VERY fragile. There are quite a few things that can cause disaster in email delivery, losses in profits, subscribers and even your domain. Take a look at Lyris report finds your email getting junked. It is getting worse and not any better. Hotmail and Yahoo junked opted-in e-mails about 20% of the time.

Idiots who click the spam button

Most people on the Internet view “email marketers” as spammers. Just mention at a social gathering that you send any type of email and the first thing out so some dumbasses mouth will be “So you are a spammer….” or “So you send spam…”

Just look at what my friend on Digg just posted and read the comments, Optimize Email Delivery with Best Practice Strategies. That was me that said “RTFA first” and I had to hold back a bit. Flame somebody on Digg and they will go to your profile and bury all your articles, accuse you of spam and get your URL blocked.

This is the mind set of most people that read our emails. If you send email you must on some level be a spammer. This translates directly to clicking the spam button just because someone did not understand your email or they felt it crossed the line of information too being commercial.

Migrating to a new server

Moving to a new server with a new IP address can be a disaster. SpamCop (now used by Microsoft), Hotmail, Windows Live Mail and a number of others all sandbox your email for up to six months under a new email server IP address.

You cannot set up a new box and start sending to your recipients like you would form the location you newsletter was previously sent from.

Adding poorly configured MTA’s and bad Authentication

I cannot tell you how many times I have helped someone who is not getting much email delivered and it turns out that their DKIM or DomainKeys authentication is not working at the ISP in question.

They tell me “Oh yeah, we already set that up and it is working fine, it passed all the tests.”

Here is a little trick. Send an email from your MTA to a Yahoo address that you have access to. Now open the email and view the header. If it says “passed” under the DKIM or DK test, you are fine. However most times it is not passing Yahoo’s test even though it came back good in the online tests.

Contact you MTA provider and you may have to possibly update your DNS entry or your MTA’s milter.

ISPs suddenly start canning your email for no reason

So let’s say Yahoo starts holding your email in it’s queue for four hours for no reason. They have been doing that lately, allot.

You keep getting “not delivered” messages so you keep resending to Yahoo. And then you resend, AGAIN. You are only hurting your reputation when you try to resend to often. When you see odd things and weird 451 emails coming back from an ISP don’t keep resending out of frustration and possible profit loss.

Stop what you are doing and find out if the problem is on their end or yours. A simple Google search of the problem can usually tell you that others are having the same problem or not.

Not using double opt in for new subscribers

Double opt in prevents spam complaints. Spam complaints are the result of a recipient clicking the “this is spam button” and will get you blocked faster than anything else. A visitor cannot misspell their email address and send someone else your emails with double opt in.

Double opt in also saves your email reputation because you are not bouncing emails to bad addresses. Those same misspelled emails that get the spam button clicked can bounce when the recipient does not exist. ISPs keep track of bounced emails and the server it is sent from. The more bounces, the lower your email reputation score.

The very first time someone clicks the “this is spam” button on an email you sent without double opt in can get you banned by the receiving ISP. Your host may delete your domain and you are going to definitely get listed on RBLs (real time blacklists).

Sure you can triple your opt in rate by not using double opt in, but all it takes is a five or six spam complaints and you are history! NO site, NO domain, GONE. Forever.

The Bottom Line

If you do not make these simple mistakes you will go a long way in avoiding spam filters and deliver more email. At the same time you will not be destroying your email reputation that you have hopefully spent alot of time building.