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Spam Increases in Volume and Cleverness
As more anti-spam bills are introduced in Congress and in state houses around the nation, spammers are increasing both their quantity and the brazenness of their deception. This has some serious impact for nonprofits that use e-mail to correspond with supporters. Not only is the volume growing, but spammers are sinking to new lows to get their message opened. Some of their tricks include: o Using a date either after today or several months in the past: knowing that most users sort their e-mail by date, a fictitious date will put the spam e-mail either at the top or the bottom of the user's list. Why risk ending up at the bottom of some users' lists? The spammers just repeat their e-mail with a bogus date in the other direction, ensuring that they end up on the top of everyone's e-mail list one way or the other. o Using fraudulent subject lines: a subject line of "re: our meeting Tuesday" or the like is one that anyone would assume is a valid e-mail. That's why spammers are using these techniques to bypass both spam filters and your own intuition. o Using deceptive "from" addresses, like "Customer Service" or "Bob." o Using personalization in the subject line, often separating the mailbox name from the domain for an attempt at greater receptiveness. In other words, separating the "user" from the "@domain.org" and placing it in the subject line can make it seem like personal e-mail. Lately I've seen two variations on this trick. Frequently I'll see e-mails that appear to be personalized to someone who might come after me alphabetically, such as 'Ronald@npadvisors' instead of 'Rick.' It happens enough that I don't think it's an error in someone's software. Rather, I think it's an attempt to prod the natural curiosity in all of us of "What are they sending to Ronald?" In a recent twist, my e-mail was forged as the "from" address, fooling me into thinking it was a message I had sent that bounced back to me. For years, direct mail fundraising experts have been tempted by, and ethical ones have resisted, the use of deceptive return addresses and teaser lines on outer envelopes. While it is often said that, "the purpose of an outer envelope is to get opened" it is also true that the outer should be opened in a way that will engender good will towards the contents. The tricks of these spammers are ones that honest direct mail professionals outgrew decades ago. The biggest danger is not the glut of anti-spam laws that are either in the legislative pipeline or already on the books. The danger to your success is the increasing digital dexterity of your supporters, as they click the 'delete' key with a 'shoot first, ask questions later' mentality. To keep getting your e-mails opened, follow these tips: o Use the correct date. o Put your organization's name in the "from" address. I got e-mail recently from the 'legislative information' office of a nonprofit, with the "from" address as simply "leginfo" and I almost deleted it before I realized what it was. o Don't get too clever with your subject lines. "Your help urgently needed" may accurately reflect your current financial condition, but it also sounds suspiciously like the e-mails from MBUTU SESSEGAWE of Kenya offering me 25% of his family's embezzled fortune. One more tip: Many spammers "harvest" e-mail addresses with software that visits web pages at random and finds e-mail addresses on the pages. If you publish e-mail addresses for staff on your web site, you're inviting spammers to harvest those addresses. You can offer this information to the public with lower risk if you use one of these, or similar, options: o Put a space in the e-mail address before or after the "@" sign so the harvesting software doesn't recognize it as an e-mail address; o Change the @ sign and the period in an e-mail address into two HTML codes, @, and .. Even if you display a person's name as a link to their e-mail address, spammers' software can often still find the address. Writing HTML code into an e-mail address can help avoid spam harvesting. August 2003 | ||
