Ask Al: We're a restaurant that just opened. We signed up for an email service provider (ESP) platform and we're looking to buy email lists to get started. Where should we start?

Hey! Thanks for reaching out, but I wanted to warn you that email list purchasing isn't the way to go here. It's problematic for multiple reasons (poor deliverability, angry recipients, poorly targeted traffic) and just about every email service provider prohibits use of purchased lists. Run away from vendors telling you that their lists contain people who did really opt-in to hear from you -- they’re typically lying. Here is just one example of why you should avoid this.

An organically grown email list for a restaurant or entertainment venue is a valuable asset and people don't usually give away that asset to others, not even for a modest fee. Meaning if somebody is offering to sell you a list, it's either questionably opt-in, or it could even be stolen. I once got spammed by a restaurant who had an employee who stole an email list from a prior restaurant they worked for. It was scummy to see and I'm pretty sure the response wasn't positive.

Instead, consider a few different methods to grow your email list from the ground up. Here’s what I would recommend for starters.

1. Make sure you have clear and easy email list signup options on your website. On every page. Very noticeably so. Some people actually want to be able to sign up for your emails when they find your website. Don't make it hard for them to do so!
2. Look for Chamber of Commerce-like groups, local neighborhood discussion groups, local foodie blogs or groups, etc., that you could potentially partner with. Ask them if they’d be willing to send out an email or partner with you to help promote your business and email list. If they are able to send out emails to help advertise you, ask them if they can include and track an option to invite people to opt-in to your email list. Or at least drive that traffic to a page on your website where people can easily opt-in. With Facebook groups and discussion boards, ask the admin if it's OK to post a bit about your restaurant there. Most neighborhood groups like hearing about new restaurants.
3. Depending on what your budget is and where you are, considered paid search. This is where you pay to place ads in Google based on certain “keywords” that people use for searches. Like “restaurants in (your town)” or terms for the type of cuisine you sell. You can often limit these geographically to help focus marketing efforts to only your area. Set a low budget in the system while you test this out, so you don't accidentally spend hundreds of dollars a day while you figure out how paid search works.
4. Similarly, Facebook ads are another option. Not my area of expertise, but there are plenty of guides out there. Here's one of them .
5. Work with a digital agency or marketing partner to help you develop an email marketing growth strategy. I know a number of them but I'm hesitant to just broadly list them here, knowing that who you should work with is going to vary based on your needs and budget. This is another area where a Chamber of Commerce-style local business group or association could help guide you toward a vendor partner.
6. Search, read and learn. There's lots of expertise out there being shared already. Take it all in . Just watch out for the "too good to be true" bits where you see stuff like people offering you a billion website visitors for fifty cents. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

I've actually done all this myself before; going back a number of years, I helped my friend's jazz club build an online presence and using SEO, paid search and organic website traffic to build their email list up to over 5,000 subscribers. (And even though the club has closed, we resurrected the email list and still send out emails to it every once in a while.) Back in this early time it wasn't always easy to measure how well our email campaigns were working, untiol we found out the silly way -- when we typo'd a cover charge in an email, lots of people came through the door expecting to pay the wrong price. It's not a practice I recommend, but it sure let us know that the emails were doing well to inform customers and potential customers about upcoming shows. What you could and should do, though, is offer specials or discounts or a spiff that only email recipients are given access to. That'll help you denote success or failure.

Good luck! And remember that spam doesn't pay. Sending unwanted emails won't make you money, and it'll just make people upset with you.

Značky: #Network, #spam

I can't tell if this article from Joe Queenan for the Wall Street Journal (paywall; sorry) is a joke or not.

Relevant excerpt: "Just one example [of legitimate email going to the spam folder]: In recent years, a great deal of criticism has been leveled at the Swedish Academy for its baffling awards of the Nobel Prize for Literature to writers no one has ever heard of. It turns out this is because the emails offering the Nobel keep going to the authors’ spam folders. Because the winners never reply, the prize goes to the next person on the list. But sometimes that person doesn’t get the email either. It might take 19 writers before one does."

The guy's a satirist, so maybe that's a clue. But, legit email getting caught up in spam is a real problem. One that I get asked about quite a bit. If anybody has any contacts the Nobel Committee, feel free to let them know that I'm ready and able to assist with any deliverability questions they might have.

Značky: #news, #spam, #funny, #Network, #stupid, #wsj

This isn't the first time I've blogged about vegan SPAM , which is a sentence I never thought I would write. But here we are, and it's making my brain hurt.

From VegNews: "Hormel Foods Corporation—known best for its canned meat product SPAM—is developing new plant-based meat alternatives. Under an exclusive partnership with food-technology company The Better Meat Co., Hormel’s venture company 199 Ventures will work to bring new plant-based meat products to the market using The Better Meat Co.’s unique fermentation technologies."

Read more about it here . Also, WHUT?!

Značky: #friday, #spam, #silly, #Network, #food

In this case, my friend (the person experiencing this pain) owns their own domain name. What's happening here is that spammers are forging email addresses at their domain, using them as from addresses for their unwanted, garbage spam runs, so that bounces back from the spam come to them, because the spammer doesn't care about or want to process bounces.

The good news is, as I mentioned all the way back in 2013 , is that spammers don't tend to fixate on one domain name or email address forever, so they'll probably move on to annoying somebody else shortly. But there are a few things you can do, as a domain owner, to help minimize the chances of having to receive these unwanted bounces:

• Implement a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) DNS record for your domain name, specifying the IP addresses that are meant to send mail for your domain. Set it to " dash all " -- you want ISPs to know that they should be free to filter mail more harshly if it fails SPF validation checks.
• Implement DKIM for your email sends. Even at the SMB level, most mail platforms provide instructions on how to configure things so that your email sends will all be authenticated via a DKIM signature. If you can't easily do this, SPF is quite likely "good enough" -- but if you can implement DKIM, you should. In some cases it's going to provide more robust email authentication compared to SPF. (I could spend another six pages diving into why I think that's the case, but in the interest of helping you move on with your life, I'll spare you.)
• Implement DMARC . DMARC can be a bit scary in that you have to make sure all of the email you send legitimately is authenticated with SPF or DKIM. But, especially at the SMB level, you can do this. It's not hard, and don't let yourself be scared -- there are tools (like the colorful Mail Tester ) that will help you test your email authentication settings to make sure you've got it right. But the key here is that enabling DMARC, with a restrictive policy like p=reject, tells ISPs to block mail that purports to be from you, but doesn't pass SPF or DKIM. You don't HAVE to work with a DMARC monitoring partner to enable DMARC -- you can publish a TXT record for _dmarc.(your domain) that contains nothing more than "v=DMARC1; p=reject;" (without quotes) and that'd do it.

DMARC is the key there. Turning that on means your domain name is no longer going to be useful to deliver spam to ISPs (like Gmail) that will block mail that fail DMARC. It makes your domain name much less palatable as an unauthorized spam sending domain.

Bonus tip: If you own your own domain name and use it for email with something like Google Workspace, there's another setting you should look for and configure: The wildcard or catch-all email setting . It can be handy (and quite useful) to configure your email service to accept mail to any address at your domain -- for example, it can be used to create custom email addresses for different registration forms -- give irs@yourdomain to your accountant and bestbuy@yourdomain to the electronics retailer, so you can track usage and/or turn off an address later, if you want. Unfortunately, if you leave "catch-all" forwarding on, that means if a spammer makes up the address ihateyourguts@yourdomain and sends a bunch of spam, those bounces are going to come back to the "ihateyourguts" address and end up in your inbox. If you turn off the catch-all, that puts a stop to that. I know, it's a bummer to turn off the easy custom address ability, but it's something to consider -- weigh the plusses and minuses of being able to receive mail at any address at your domain, versus the unintended side effects of receiving unwanted "backscatter" bounces.

I helped my friend implement all of these -- including disabling "catch-all" email forwarding (while helping them build a manual list of email aliases to continue forwarding to their main inbox) -- and we think it helped. It's not like we did a scientific study, but the bounces dropped off and disappeared pretty quickly. I think the spammers moved on to greener pastures.

If you're new to all of this and wondering what SPF, DKIM and DMARC DNS records look like, here are the ones for spamresource.com: SPF , DKIM , DMARC . The SPF record contains the IP addresses of a couple of servers I own as well as an include showing that I utilize Google Workspace. The DKIM record (called a DKIM public key) is a DNS string provided by Google Workspace's DKIM configuration tool, and the DMARC record is just a very simple "tell ISPs to reject it if it doesn't pass authentication."

Značky: #forgery, #help, #spam, #Network, #backscatter, #bounces, #spf, #dkim, #dmarc