Update (4 hours post-publishing): To expand a little bit on the above, a snippet from an email that I sent to a correspondent who prefers not to be named. I’ll just say that I’m pleased and impressed when people respond very reasonably to criticism that might perhaps be called “snarky.”

What struck me about the email, though, is that in a message that’s about social communication tools being introduced, the email tells people how they shouldn’t communicate (all caps “PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL”) rather than telling them what they should do if they want to communicate with you. Why not shift the focus to providing guidance to subscribers, rather than stopping one particular behavior?

Amazon Recommends Pretending to Target Emails
In other news, the Amazon recommendation email situation that I’ve blogged about before continues its slide into absurdity. For a quick recap:

• Back in the winter of 2005 Amazon would email me about stuff like an opportunity to get an 18% discount when pre-ordering an M83 album because I’d bought “Svefn-G-Englar” by Sigur Rós. Good.
• In the spring of 2007 Kim Cameron wrote about the same sort of positive experience with Amazon recommendation emails. Excellent.
• Come the winter of 2008, things get ugly. Because I have “shopped for electronics” (not purchased, mind you, but shopped for) Amazon emails me to recommend that I buy an Archos DVR. Lame. I have to assume there’s a new hire in the marketing department.

And now it’s the spring of 2008 and that new marketing hire appears to have settled in for the long haul. What’s the latest recommendation email from Amazon?

As someone who purchased video games or music from genres included in the game, you might be interested in our Grand Theft Auto IV music downloads store.

Seriously, Amazon? I’ve purchased “video games or music from genres included in the game?” Wouldn’t it be simpler to just skip a couple of steps and move directly into emailing me whatever your marketing department wants to send, whenever they want to send it? Once useful email program, fast becoming a sad joke.

But then we have times like this weekend, when examples just jump right up and wave at me, saying “Hi there! the organization that sent me hasn’t given any actual thought to email since early 2000!”

Exhibit One: Content
SiteMeter has started sending out an email newsletter good for them. Good for them, also, that they had the good sense to send multi-part emails. Less good, however, that no one at SiteMeter appears to have heard the phrase “images blocked by default,” nor that it’s absurd and irritating to use donotreply@yourdomain.com as the from address. Are you really that opposed to hearing from your customers?

So I’m sure that the creative was attractive and engaging, but—alas—the entire HTML creative was images, which are blocked by default in my email reader. All that I saw of the newsletter was the unsubscribe link, which I then used:

Exhibit Two: Reputation
Apparently much of the email sent to AOL and MSN/Hotmail subscribers by Truthout.org is not getting through. On their Web site, truthout notes that “the Microsoft-Hotmail administrators inform us that they are blocking our communications to Truthout subscribers on their systems due to what they describe as our ‘reputation.’”

While it’s not entirely clear, Truthout.org’s communications on the issue suggests to me that they believe that the “reputation” in question is their political reputation, and the idea that they might have a reputation as an email sender is entirely new and strange to the organization.

It’s possible that I’m misreading the situation, but since the org’s first response was to call for subscribers to put pressure on the ISPs involved, it appears that truthout may only now be learning the ins and outs of sending email in the modern world. And for an organization that depends heavily on email, that’s a very, very big issue to have overlooked.

Why am I sharing? Well, it seems that one of the mechanisms that I sometimes use to send personal mail (from whitney@absono.us) has not actually been sending messages to the intended recipients…nor has it been bouncing messages to any mailbox that I can remember setting up. Hmmmm.

I’ll be cleaning up the whole system over the next few days, but if you’ve been waiting for a reply to a relatively recent email, it’d probably be a good idea to contact me again as I may think that I’ve already replied to you.

For what it’s worth, if you’re waiting for a reply to a not-so-recent email it’d probably be a good idea to contact me again; I still may think that I’ve replied to you, but I’ll have to blame that on absent-mindedness rather than technology.

From: Carl Hutzler [XXX@aol.com]
Sent: Tue 4/25/2006 7:02 AM
To: ip@v2.listbox.com; David Farber
Subject: Update [Re: [IP] AOL blocking Gmail]

As promised, an update.

Late last night around 11pm, we added into our whitelist a number of
Gmail IP addresses for their outbound systems. Evidently gmail had sent
us an email asking for more servers to be added to our whitelist for
protection but had done so at 4:45pm yesterday. The request had not yet
been processed. I esclaated internally and they got it done. So all is
well now.

So now we will have to see if gmail's outbound spam problem is high on
their list to fix or whether they are more interested in adding capacity
to accommodate the increase in outbound spam,  umm mail  

Oh, and one other thing, all their spam is domainkeys signed. This
emergency whitelisting combined with the fact that all their spam is
signed is a little ironic if you have been following the dearaol.com
debate.  

-Carl

This just came through Dave Farber’s IP list:

Date: April 24, 2006 5:05:08 PM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Subject: AOL blocking Gmail

Dave, just had a lively and interesting conversation with an AOL
postmaster phone number.  When they get reports from their users of
spam from a given host, they start rate-limiting mail from that
source.  When a given source is huge, it's inevitable that there will
be spam-marked mail from within that space, and even if it's just
amateur users who mark as spam mail that comes to them that they don't
want to see, whether it's spam or not:  with two larger user bases, it
can easily add up to a number of complaints that triggers aol's
mechanism.

So, net result, if you have a gmail account and try to write to
aol.com addresses now, you will probably not get through immediately.
You will probably get a message from google telling you that your
message has been delayed and giving an aol postmaster address,
http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/421rlynw.html, that tells you
that your site (i.e., Gmail) is being rate-limited and delayed inbound
to aol.

AOL's response to a complaint is to tell the Gmail user to tell Google
that there's a problem.  Clash of the titans?

Technorati Tagging: aol google email

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased “Svefn-G-Englar” by Sigur Rós also purchased the work of M83. For this reason, you might like to know that M83’s “Before the Dawn Heals Us” will be released on January 25, 2005. You can pre-order your copy at a savings of 18% by following the link below.

[...]

Now that is what I consider to be an effectively personalized email. Where eBay just sent me whatever crap they were sending to everyone else, “personalizing” it with my account name, Amazon is contacting me based on my prior purchase history.

Both eBay and Amazon have similar kinds of information about me, but Amazon actually made good use of that information (I bought a Sigur Rós album), combining it with information of their own (new M83 release coming out) to create a compelling offer (discount for pre-ordering the album).

I could see the tone of this email putting some people off, but I actually like it: they simply note that there’s a correlation between purchases of Sigur Rós albums an M83 albums…people who buy one also tend to buy the other. Since there’s a new M83 album coming out, people who have bought Sigur Rós might want to pre-order that M83 album at a discount. Simple. No hard sell.

This benefits me, either letting me know about an album that I might like or getting me a discount on a album I was going to buy anyway; this benefits Amazon, since records by French techno-ambient bands don’t tend sell all that well at the best of times. Amazon is likely to get some extra sales of this album because they analyzed the data that they have on their many, many customers, found some significant correlations, and put together a simple communication strategy…and that — I hope and trust — will turn into extra sales for Amazon.

Amazon, 1. eBay, 0.

Advertisers love the word “personalization,” particularly in the context of online advertising where everything is handled by machines — often tied to a database of information about the individual being targeted — and the costs of personalization are therefore relatively low. Unfortunately, these advertisers also frequently have sad little ideas of what constitutes personalization.

Let’s take eBay as our victim for this discussion. I’ve purchased items from eBay quite a few times over the last few years: at the very least they have a reasonable amount of data on the sorts of things that I bid on and buy, and they probably have a lot more information than that.

What does eBay do with that information? Well, in the last month they’ve sent me several emails promoting offers that are of absolutely no interest to me. Apparently I was supposed to respond positively to those emails because they were “personalized” with the account name that I use for eBay:

Dear eBay2002, these emails begin, as though I’ll see that and get a warm and fuzzy feeling that someone at eBay is actually sitting down and writing an email to me — person to person — because that eBay employee thinks that I’d be interested in buying jewelery for someone as a holiday gift.

It’s mind boggling. What benefit does this “personalization” offer me? I already know that eBay knows my account ID and email address, and I don’t care. The fact that they can pull this information from a database and slap it into a bulk email doesn’t impress me in the slightest: the content of the email that they’re sending to me is still totally generic, reflecting nothing about my interests or history with eBay.

I’ve purchased computer equipment and peripherals, work by and about cartoonists like Charles Addams and Edward Gorey, New York City transit memorabilia, and a host of other items…if they’re going to send me email promoting things that they’ve got for sale, why is eBay not sending me emails about stuff that I might have some possibility of actually buying?

The answer is probably twofold. First, eBay can already say that they’re sending “personalized” email, and it would be a lot more complicated to start targeting and sending truly personalized emails. Since their practices are already buzzword-compliant, there’s little incentive to invest time and money in making them work better. The second issue is a horribly common mindset when it comes to email: advertisers and marketers often don’t think about sending email “messages” to their clients or subscribers, but rather in terms of sending email “blasts” out to a faceless, undifferentiated list, on a schedule determined by the marketing department.

Because it’s about as cheap and easy to send out 10,000 or 100,000 email messages as it is to send 100 or 1,000 messages, it’s easy to just “send them all and see what sticks;” without a significant financial disincentive, marketers default to mailing more rather than mailing intelligently. “List segmentation” sounds like something complicated and difficult, but it really just amounts to thinking about the people you’re trying to communicate with. Showing some interest in and respect for those people. Remembering that there’s an individual attached to that email address.

I have to give them some credit though…there aren’t many startups that manage to pack quite so many buzzwords into their pitch: see, it’s an anti-spam company, but it’s also a social software/networking company, with a hint of penny black-style micropayments for email to spice things up. If only they’d figured out a way to get RSS into the mix…or perhaps that’s coming in the next release.

I’d write more on Affini’s services, but after registering and poking around on their site I’m too confused to even try to explain it It’s not actually a Web-based email account, you have to pay (currently “tokens” but eventually cash) to send email to other Affini members, non-Affini members have to “verify their identity” before they can send mail to you…I’m still not entirely clear how I would actually *send* email from my affini.com address without manually changing my email client settings, and the emails that I’ve sent to that address are bouncing with the message that the user is unknown in the virtual alias table.

Affini has put together a fascinating offering…whatever it is. I suppose that they can honestly claim to be the market leader in their space…whatever it is. VCs, don’t miss this opportunity to invest in Affini…whatever it is.