Below is a detailed report about list hygiene and why it is so important to mailers.  This information is extremely valuable to anyone wanting to understand the email marketing world.

Data Hygiene

Ever have that feeling that there is “one” email in your entire marketing list of thousands if not millions that is giving you trouble?  Are you afraid to send email because of complainers or being blacklisted?  Fact is that “one” complainer can contaminate your entire marketing list if you do not have the means to remove them.  In most cases, there is no way to find that email.  Most ISPs will not divulge the information hence you have to find them yourselves.  You can spend countless of hours looking for the problem, but more than likely, traps look like any other ordinary email address, so you’re stuck with it.  Data hygiene is the first thing you must do in order to be a successful emailer.

Seeding

A clean marketing list is the key to clean IPs and deliverability.  They say cleanliness is next to godliness and in this case, it is so true.  It takes months if not years to create your own marketing list and most companies will protect them at all costs.  A common task that takes place is seeding.  Seeding is planting certain emails secretly inside lists in order to see how many companies are sending email to that particular list.  This is a perfect way to catch thieves or to see who is abusing their list.  Some also seed in spam trap emails.  These are the worst.  Spam trap emails are deliberate emails that list you right away.  You need to avoid these emails, period.  You’ll know if you have one.  Your IPs will get listed right away with Spamcop, CBL or worse, Spamhaus.

Departmentalized emails

A big problem that is highly unnoticed is department emails.  In example:  info@, sales@, webmaster@ etc.  There are hundreds of these types and emailing them can get you in trouble.  When someone signs up to receive solicitation, they do not use their department email address.  When lists get traded or purchased, some add these emails to disrupt the sender to keep their list uncontaminated.  In example:  abuse@ or spam@.  Administrators are notorious for adding these emails to lists that they trade or sell away.  Why do they do it?  They still use the list!  The more companies sending ads to their list, the less efficient it will be.  A lot of companies sell their lists in desperate mode, unfortunately.

Anti-spammers

Have you ever wished you had a list of anti-spamming agencies?  Below are some of the big ones.  Remember this, anti-spammers are your friend.  If you play by the rules and contact these guys if problems arise, the better your chances are you can keep marketing.  You have two choices when emailing.  Play on the dark side or the white listed side (whitehat/blackhat).  I would recommend not playing dirty.  Each year that goes by, the more sophisticated the blocking capabilities.  It’s a huge game of chess out there and every move counts.  Learn everything about your opponent.  Play dumb.  The less sophisticated you look, the faster you can learn how to play by the rules.  If you deliberately start emailing without knowing how, they will tell your ISP to shut your domain down.  According to them, you broke the law.  You’d be lucky to ever get a hold of them, too.  They hate email advertisements.  To them, it’s worse than murder.

The Abusive Hosts Blocking http://www.ahbl.org
ASPEWS – Another Spam Prevention Early Warning http://www.aspews.org
Backscatterer.org http://www.backscatterer.org
Barracuda http://www.barracudacentral.org/rbl/listing-methodology
Burnt-Tech DNS Block List http://dnsbl.burnt-tech.com
Composite Block List (CBL) http://cbl.abuseat.org
CASA-CBL http://anti-spam.org.cn
CYBERLOGIC http://www.cyberlogic.ca
Dead Beef http://spam.deadbeef.com/bl/
DeLink http://dnsbl.delink.net
DNSBL http://www.dnsbl.info
DNSBL Offshore http://www.dnsbl.net.au
Email Basura http://www.emailbasura.org
Fabel Sources http://www.fabel.dk/relay/
Five Ten Free http://www.five-ten-sg.com/blackhole.php
HIL Habeas http://www.returnpath.net
Host Karma (I get no spam) http://wiki.ctyme.com/index.php/Spam_DNS_Lists
INPS http://dnsbl.inps.de/
NiX Spam http://www.dnsbl.manitu.net
Kempt.net http://www.kempt.net/spam-policy.html
KOEPNET http://kristian.oermen.tel/blacklist/
Leadmon.Net’s SpamGuard http://www.leadmon.net/spamguard/
MSRBL http://www.msrbl.com/
Nether Relayes http://puck.nether.net/or/
No-More-Funn http://www.moensted.dk/spam/no-more-funn/
0SPAM http://0spam.fusionzero.com/
Passive Spam Block List http://psbl.surriel.com/
Rangers RBL http://dnsbl.rangers.eu.org/
Sender Score http://sendersupport.senderscore.net/
Sorbs Block List http://www.au.sorbs.net/
Spam Cannibal http://www.spamcannibal.org/cannibal.cgi
Spam Cop http://spamcop.net/bl.shtml
Spamhaus http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/index.lasso
Spam Rats http://www.spamrats.com/rats-noptr.php
Starloop www.riverfrontsolutions.net
Technovision http://bl.technovision.dk/lookup.cgi
Lashback http://www.lashback.com/support/UBLLookup.aspx
UCE Protect Network http://www.uceprotect.net/
Virbl-project http://virbl.bit.nl/
Weighted Private Block List http://www.wpbl.info/
ZapBL http://zapbl.net/ 

Spidering

True and real spamming is programmatically pulling emails off of websites and sending an instant email advertisement to them.  This is a “bad” way to go.  Spidering off websites and capturing emails for email marketing purposes will get you in hot trouble.  Most smart administrators lace their websites with spam traps.  How do you obtain a spam trap email?  Go to any of the anti-spammer websites and use their email.  They freely advertise their emails in order to shut you down.  Hiding spam traps is a common practice for webmasters of large organizations.  If there is a form on a website, chances are there is a capture page and a storage container for these emails.  If the site is secure, you would need a hacker in order to break in.  Administrators are trained to secure and arm their sites.  Spidering programs go in a site and look for the “@” sign.  It pulls all letter and numbers before and after the “@” and stores the emails in a CSV file.  If you purchase a marketing list, you have a 80% chance that the list was mostly built using this technique.  You may never know if the list was spidered so take all precautions when buying lists.  Spidering is not a good practice.

Complainers

It used to be really hard to complain if someone is spamming you.  Most complainers were IT guys, administrators or webmasters.  They knew how to contact the domain and IP hosts.  Now, anyone can be a complainer thanks to Microsoft’s Junk Folder program and upgraded free email accounts.  Microsoft’s Outlook Junk Folder program grabs IPs and reports them as spam.  Online email accounts like Gmail or Yahoo now have a simple button that reports IPs as spam.  Unfortunately, your email can be reported by hundreds if not thousands at a time which can get you in trouble.  When one person complains, they truly do not want to be emailed at all.  The less emails of complainers the better.  You can’t force people to want to receive advertisements.  The best thing to do is get rid of complainers.  Complainers are different than unsubscribers.  Unsubscribers just don’t want email from that certain group.  Complainers want to be removed from all.

Unsubscribes

Self explanatory.  Honor your unsubscribes.  You have 30 days to remove an unsubscribe.  Best practices are weekly.  Keep them separate from your complainers.  Just because they don’t want your services, they may want someone else’s.  Trade or sell them.  They are useful elsewhere.

Spam Traps

Anti-spammers create traps.  Most won’t admit it, but some fill out forms online and add an email trap to a suspecting spammer in order to shut them down faster.  Most lists have them believe it or not.  Some look like automatic numbers and letters generated from spambots and some look like ordinary emails like john@johnscompany.com.  There is no automated system that can locate and find the traps.  They must be emailed to in order to remove them.  The most successful emailers are ones who share their suppression lists with each other or set up a pool.  When a trap is set, emailers have to break the lists up into smaller ones to locate, email and set it off again.  Once they locate the section of emails with the trap in it, they remove the entire section and add it to the suppression file.  This takes forever but it’s the only way to get rid of traps.  ISPs and Anti-spammers will NOT give them up unless you smooth talk with them or buy them outright.

HAMY’s

HAMY’s are the most common emails to have in lists.  HAMY is short for Hotmail, AOL, MSN and Yahoo.  A lot of emailers or marketing columnists would recommend you get rid of these emails.  Each ISP has a threshold they allow into their network during certain times.  In example, Yahoo might only let’s 2,000 – 3,000 emails in every 24 hours.  If you have a list of say 40,000 Yahoo addresses, you are just wasting time and resources sending to the rest.  Most bulk emailers just get rid of them, period.  But some will argue that having those separate and email to them in that fashion is worth it.  In example, AOL is such an old network that people usually keep their email and some claim they are highly responsive.  They say AOL is worth only sending a few at a time.  Whether you’re B2B or B2C, you will just have to test it out yourself and figure out if having these emails in or out is worth it.

Deduplication

Duplicate emails are easy to get rid of if you have Microsoft Office Excel 2007.  It has a handy little dedupe program integrated into it.  It removes the entire line and you can sort alphabetically.  Excel can handle a little over a million records, but it bogs down considerably if your list has more than 12 columns and a million rows.  You need a fast machine to sort and dedupe that kind of list and if you do so, make sure the email is in the first column.  Excel has a bug (or user error) and sorting can really get you in trouble unless you have your records straight.  Selling a list with a sort error can be a disaster.  Sorting and duplicating by email is the best way to go.  It is estimated that per household, each person has at least 3 emails:  personal, work and alias.  If you dedupe by physical address, you may lose a unique record because who knows which email at that physical address could belong to.  Duplication is an art when it comes to email, address and names.  There are several programs out there that have “fuzzy” logic that interprets names with address and emails which merges them together.  It’s a time consuming and expensive process if you do it alone.