sippey.com

ironport to cisco

Congrats to Scott Weiss and the whole crew at Ironport (read the announcement -- bought by Cisco for $800mm in cash and stock).  I had a chance to meet Scott back when email was my life, and from the beginning it was clear they were building a great product and a great company.  Kudos!

yahoo buys stata labs

Oh, man things are getting interesting in the Google v. Yahoo v. Microsoft battle.  Gotta believe that Yahoo didn't pick up Stata Labs for their Windows spam assassin client, but rather for the search tech that's inside Bloomba.  It's not hard to imagine them building a rich client for email and feed reading that complements the online experience that I'm sure they're building with what they picked up from Oddpost.

The other interesting thing about this is that the Outlook-alternative market is once again wide open.  It's now down to Eudora and Thunderbird, neither of which have decent email search tools, nor offer any significant "intertwinglyness" that modern communication clients so desperately need.

blowing the opt out opportunity

You'd think by now -- more than 10 months after CAN-SPAM went into effect -- that companies doing legitimate business via email would have their act together about opt-out language and workflow. 

Not so much.

That thumbnail (click for a bigger version) is a just-captured screenshot from Jet Blue's unsubscribe page.  The language reads...

To unsubscribe from our mailing list, please confirm the information below and click submit.
Email address:  michael@the...
Unsubscribe:  ( ) IN     ( ) OUT

Do I choose "in" to "opt-in" to their unsubscribe list?  Or do I choose "out" to opt out of their subscription list?

Now, under a strict interpretation of the law, Jet Blue is probably in compliance.  Their message contained a clear and conspicuous method of unsubscribing -- a link to this unsubscribe page; and the law doesn't specify any ease-of-use requirements for the web-based opt-out process. 

That process, by the way, should be considered an opportunity to thank the customer for their business, not to confuse and obfuscate the unsbuscribe process.  Companies that do it right use appropriate copy and design to (a) try to convince the customer to dial back their subscription preferences instead of unsubbing entirely, and/or (b) thank them for the privilege they've had of landing in their inbox, and apologize for disappointing them.  Despite the millions of dollars of investment in a "friendly" brand image, all Jet Blue manages to do here is further annoy an already annoyed customer.

gmail and marketer control

Why are marketers so afraid of gmail?

So Al DiGuido, CEO of Bigfoot Interactive, a successful email services agency, had a piece in this week's ClickZ titled Do You Gmail?, in which he advised marketers to consider refusing to send email to customers with gmail.com addresses. As DiGuido explains it, the fear is that companies who have spent dear resources on customer acquisition will have their messages delivered alongside contextual ads for competitive products and services.

A major credit card issuer excels at attracting a particular market segment. Gmail offers that company's envious competitors the opportunity to specifically and efficiently target that issuer's customers with contextual ads. The marketer spent millions growing this segment; should it be protected?

Now, given the overall noise in the market, and the challenging signal/noise ratio in the email channel in particular, one would think that marketers would be looking for any invitation to communicate directly with their customers. How could a marketer even think about disrepecting a customer's choice of email domains by refusing to send them email? If your relationship with your customer is so tenuous that you're worried about contextual text ads inside gmail having a significant impact on your customer lifetime value equation, then maybe you shouldn't be emailing that customer in the first place.

aol / mailblocks

So AOL picked up Mailblocks. All the attention is focused on the Mailblocks challenge / response filtering methodology, which reportedly AOL will integrate into its existing mail services. News.com even described Mailblocks as an "antispam software company" in its story, instead of an email inbox provider (web, POP, IMAP) with great filtering tools. But I'm more interested in what they're going to do with Mailblocks' web app, which while less whiz-bangy than Oddpost's is faster and more usable...though still not on Firefox.

Terms weren't disclosed. Any guesses? Oddpost: $30mm. Mailblocks: $____mm?

lookout, microsoft

This actually did surprise me -- Microsoft bought Lookout, the search plugin that made Outlook usable for email addicts. I thought Microsoft would insist on doing this themselves....

g-mailto bookmarklet

Following the lead of Rabid Squirrel's g-mailto, I worked up a bookmarklet to pop up a new message window off my browser toolbar. I've only tested this on IE6 for Windows, but it's the standard javascript stuff, so it should work everywhere. Here you go...

» Drag this link to your toolbar: g-mailto

If you read the Rabid Squirrel definition of field variables (to, cc, bcc, subject, body, etc.) you could probably modify the link above to fit your particular email needs. I haven't yet mucked about to see if it's possible to pull page titles or selected text from the browser and force it into message fields, but if that's possible the bookmarklet could become a great way to have the "send page by email" function via Gmail.

Update. Lazyweb to the rescue! The ever-resourceful Adam Mathes hacked up an improvement that pulls the current page's title and inserts into the subject line, inserts the page URL and any selected text into the body of the message. You can grab it here, or just do the drag thing again...

» Drag this link to your toolbar: g-mailit

I've got both of these living side by side now. One for quick access to a blank message (g-mailto), the other for "mail this page" functionality (g-mailit).

Enjoy.

strong week

Strong Week (a weekly email newsletter geared toward the lively arts) is back after a painful hiatus; now with editions for San Francisco and Portland.

"As in life itself, forward liberally."

infect your friends!

Bryan Boyer points out a smart Gmail UI doo-hickey. If you have invites available, and you're replying to someone who does not have a gmail.com address, you get an unobtrusive menu item that lets you invite that person to Gmail. And it's personalized with that person's first name. ("Invite Tekla to join Gmail.")

It's the 2004 Google equivalent of the famously viral 1996 Hotmail .sig.

bring in the program manager

Some interesting news from the OSAF -- they're hiring a Program Manager. Which means that Chandler must be far enough along in its development to actually need someone to translate, prioritize moderate and mediate end user requirements into a usable product. It'll be interesting to see who they land for this gig; I can't imagine a more important role in getting an actual product to market...

it's all about relevance

The themes at Inbox seem to be relevance and heterogeneity. The attention and investment that's going into email -- at the ISP level, the enterprise level, the workgroup level and the client level -- signals that the channel isn't going away anytime soon. The folks here are focused on creating technology to improve the signal to noise ratio for the email user. Spam filtering, email collaboration tools, alerting technologies, client side developments -- they're all pointing towards helping individuals focus on information that matters to them.

This is not a challenge that's going to get addressed overnight, since by definition there's nothing more personal than "what matters to me." One filtering technology may solve your spam problem, but not mine. One email client may do wonders for your information management challenges, but fall completely flat for me. The application space is broad enough -- and the market is large enough -- to support heterogeneity of approaches up and down the delivery chain.

inbox conference

Really looking forward to being at Inbox tomorrow; I'll be surprised if anyone actually shows up for my session at 8 am. I'm very interested to see if there's any connection there between the email "industry" and the folks that are buyers / consumers of enterprise-level email services. While I didn't get a chance to hit this year's Ad:Tech, what I heard over and over from attendees was that the buzz was high, but it was all the usual suspects talking to themselves again...and very few buyers of the products and services being hawked and squawked. (Is it even possible to put on an industry conference in a vertical and break out of the echo chamber?)

Relatedly, Esther Dyson reports that the CIOs in attendance weren't really clued in to sender authentication: "'Are you prepared to implement Sender ID?' Excuse me, but they didn't even understand the question. One started talking about how he wants a personal spam filter. Another said yeah, we're a PR firm and we really are careful about what we send out." Without a homogenous spam filtering solution (and thank GOD for that, that's the last thing we need is a single toll taker deciding what's in and what's out), it's going to take a lot of down and dirty blocking and tackling to get the Fortune 1000 (not to mention the middle market players where stuff like sender auth really could have an impact) to pay attention.

what do you mean it's not in your records?

Dear Mercury News / Realcities,

Why do you insist on telling me that "my email address is not in your records" when I subscribe to receive (and regularly open!) three of your email subscription products? All I want to do is click between this story and this story without going through yet another poorly designed "log in or register" experience.

In other words, you should invest in a single sign-on system -- the excuse that "our email address database is managed separately," is not an acceptable excuse, especially since you use email address as the user ID.

Thanks,
Michael

email and attention management

Esther Dyson's speaking at Inbox (hey, I'm in good company!). Despite all the hoo ha about the supposed death of email, Esther posts today about the future of email...

More fundeamentally, as the world becomes more real-time and connected, the virtual and increasingly the actual configuration of the system is changing. There's a rich, complex, shared data store in the cloud, and mail is simply the passing of notifications and alerts that tell you to pay attention to/download specific items in the cloud that are new or changed or that someone wants to share with you. this creates huge challenges in version control, updating and permission management.

Outside the realm of person-to-person correspondence, email is about notification, information flow, and as Esther points out later in the post, attention management. Esther's right on the money that clients will evolve to help individuals manage that flow, and make sure that they're paying attention to the right stuff. But it's a two-way street -- the senders that get it right will win good will, incremental business and long term loyalty from their readers / users / customers.

gmail and spam filtering

A quick note about Gmail and spam filtering. Their filters out of the gate are pretty tight, but not perfect. They're not catching everything, and there have been quite a few false positives -- not on personal mail, but on things like the New York Times daily news headlines. I assume that the "report as spam" feature (which moves messages to your spam list) feeds back into Gmail's spam filtering tools; and I also assume that the converse is true -- if you mark a mis-classified email as "not spam," that action will contribute to their rulesets. It's only a week into the beta, but a week of consistently telling the system that the New York Times is not spamming me hasn't had an impact on their filters. But hey, I'm just one guy.

That said, there's a "yet to be documented" feature of Gmail to help work around these issues. If you add the sender of the message to your contacts list, Gmail will consider those messages "not spam." Which means they already have the basics in place for a more robust whitelist filtering system. And, of course, it's a no-brainer to imagine layering in your Orkut's social network to further extend your whitelist. (A no-brainer to imagine. Not a no-brainer to implement in a seamless and elegant way.)

another gmail idea

Here's a Gmail idea: a bookmarklet to "send this page to my Gmail account." This could enable searchable storage of pages of interest -- not blogging links, but providing a way to keep pages that you need to store (transaction confirmations) or search personally. Optionally the user should be able to (a) pre-assign a label and (b) skip the inbox for pages you're sending into your Gmail account.

gmail and the conversation ui

Here's something to watch on Gmail. When the masses come streaming in with visions of 1gb of storage, will they "get" the display of messages by conversation? Or will Google need to add a "traditional" list view where each individual message is iterated? I'm still getting used to the Gmail approach; the expanding / collapsing message cards are useful (they put individual messages in contest, and they help you catch up on new mailing list traffic quickly), but collapsing all the messages of a thread into a single item in the "all mail" view isn't entirely intuitive at first.

(And of course, I'm imagining Google leveraging this UI into Groups and potentially the RSS aggregation space. Groups makes sense -- conversations can be expanded / collapsed like email. RSS aggregation would be intriguing; they could combine conversation threads across feeds based on content analysis. "Here are all the posts in chron order from the feeds you subscribe to about Janet Jackson's impersonation of Condi Rice.")

notes on gmail

Because I'm just a bit obsessive about email, a few notes on the screenshots of Gmail posted by Kevin Fox.

• Primary button for managing messages? Archive. Not delete, archive. I'm sure there's a delete action in the "more actions..." dropdown. Reinforces the two key value props of the service: a gig of storage, and email search.* This also signals to me that they must be fairly confident in their spam filtering...
• The conversation threading is interesting; especially the toggle for "show quoted text." The rules around that must be interesting.
• Assume that clicking on the little blue star is the equivalent of flagging a message in Outlook. I'm not gonna file this, but I need to be able to find it quickly for action.
• Assume that multiple labels can be assigned to each message. Voila, virtual folders.
• Does the proximity of the "Create a Filter" action to the search box mean that any search term can be turned into a filter?
• What's that textarea doing at the bottom of the message? Quick reply?
• Did Jason and Kevin hardcode their links to shellen.com and fury.com? Or is Gmail parsing those and linking them automagically?
• Check out those hotkey shortcuts. Nice.

According to Kevin's post, the related pages aren't ads, they're related pages. Speaking of ads... Even looking at the related pages on the screenshots, the targeting to the message content is a bit...foreign. But Jarvis put a fine point on the whole issue today: if you're using a webmail service, they're already scanning the content of every single one of your messages -- for spam filtering purposes. (And then again for security purposes, stripping out HTML tags/scripting that will conflict with their UI or introduce vulnerabilities.)

* The Gmail archive button is the interface equivalent of the big yellow pause button on the Tivo remote. They both live at the intersection of interaction design and marketing.

google mail

Given the vague nature of the opt-out requirements in CAN SPAM, especially around the definition of who is the "sender" when you have third party commercial ads appearing in a message, I'm wondering about the likelihood of Google actually getting into the "inserting ads in email for list publishers" business. Unless, of course, they're planning on operating a centralized clearinghouse for opt-out processing. Which, while theoretically interesting on paper, would be nearly impossible to manage in practice. (There are just too many actors, and the landscape too rocky.) At any rate, their lawyers must be working overtime...

share the love

Why I just opted out of Amazon's "share the love" program: I'm tired of receiving "look at how smart I am for purchasing this book, I thought I'd share this fact with the rest of the world!" messages gussied up as 10% off promotional offers. Like "George" actually cares enough to send me a 10% discount on The History of Iraq*. Puh-lease.

* Names and book titles changed to protect the guilty.