Sorting E-mail, Time After Time

By: Carl Sullivan So how can newspapers make sure their e-mail reaches readers who've signed up for it? The most effective way today might not do the trick tomorrow.

That's because new filters are being used everyday by various Internet service providers (ISPs), corporations, and even individual users, in a near-infinite combination of configurations. And there are no standard definitions or technologies being used by the countless organizations involved in the worldwide e-mail network.

At a three-day U.S. Federal Trade Commission forum on spam last week, some participants lobbied for standards that would make it easier to sort legitimate e-mail from the junk.

"We hope the industry can come up with some standards to help ISPs - maybe standardizing bounce codes, DNS [domain name system] lookups, and the ways that ISPs validate the sender of every e-mail," says Al DiGuido, CEO of New York's Bigfoot Interactive. Bigfoot handles permission-based e-mail programs for more than 150 companies, including Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive and Cox Newspapers Inc. of Atlanta. DiGuido thinks government will act to stop the most egregious senders of unsolicited pornography and marketing offers. And, sure enough, Virginia on Tuesday enacted the first antispam statute with criminal penalties.

Meanwhile, educational campaigns may be part of the answer. For example, Bigfoot ran an initiative to alert America Online Inc. users who've signed up for e-mail newsletters. Those users were advised to add the "From:" addresses on their favorite e-mail messages to their address books. That simple step helps prevent messages from being junked under AOL's mail-filter rules.

LancasterOnline Webmaster Karl Kittler has spent a lot of time thinking about this topic lately as his employer, Lancaster Newspapers in Pennsylvania, plans to begin offering e-mail headlines to readers. Kittler has these elementary tips:

1) Limit the number of e-mail messages sent at any one time to avoid volume filters.

2) Always use the "To:" and "From:" lines on e-mail messages.

3) Make sure the reverse DNS lookup on your server is valid. If it isn't, some filters will bounce the message back.

4) Offer text-only e-mail to those who can't receive HTML (or don't want to).

"Publishers have got to be proactive, and they need to thoroughly test their e-mails with various software," in the same way that they should be testing their Web sites on various Internet browsers and operating systems, says Howard I. Finberg, a Poynter Institute faculty member. Vigilance is required since filters change all the time, as do the methods used by publishers to send their e-mail. For a short period, Poynter's filters accidentally labeled CNN.com news alerts as spam, but the problem was quickly fixed. The complexity of the issue is one reason some publishers turn to third-party vendors to handle their opt-in e-mail. Companies such as Bigfoot and PublishMail conduct extensive testing of e-mail applications, ISP software, and even antivirus programs to make sure messages are delivered. Vendors also can provide powerful reporting to advertisers on how many messages were actually opened by consumers.

Whether you outsource your operation or go it alone, designate a high-level person in your organization to monitor the trends, experts say. "The filtering technology will get better, and ISPs will get more knowledgeable," predicts Ronald Dupont Jr., former general manager of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times' Web site. "In the meantime, newspapers need to be ever vigilant of bounce-back e-mails and deal with any filtering problems by immediately contacting the ISP. ... The problem will be solved by the marketplace over the next few years. There are just too many businesses, including ISPs themselves, that offer opt-in e-mail and make big money from it."