This article states that 57% of these campaigns are almost completely image based. These campaigns are likely to have a higher catch rate by spamfilters and anti spam counter measures deployed on the local computer. Not to forget that most email clients now turn off showing images in the email body from external online sources for security reasons.

Now, take out an standard Spamassassin installation with the default rules and analyse some emails with text/images and image only based email. You will notice that Spamassassin will give the image based only email some extra scoring. The email with text and images will have a lower scoring. The lower scoring could have as a result that the message gets delivered while the image only based email is placed in quarantine or being blocked as spam.

Marketeers need to be aware of the fact that image based email is often confused with spam email. Spam is also quite often only image based.

Another point is the fact that images in email clients aren’t shown by default when the message is received as this is a security feature of the email client. In this case, the message that you want to deliver as marketeer or e-campaign administrator isn’t viewable for the receiver.

Personnaly, when I receive image based only email I think it can’t be interesting, there is no content, and therefore it gets deleted.

Marketeers, and everyone else who sends newsletters or email based campaigns, needs to be aware of certain points to pass by any spam filters, get the email to the inbox and attract the receivers attention. This can only be done by offering content and information with a balance between the text and image parts. This results in building a much more complex HTML email template and some additional testing but it will be worth the effort.

Last time it was a lot of trouble getting of that list and they send their mailings too many times. To give you an idea: we intercepted emails from FashionShopping on a daily base since april until yesterday, May 8th. 80% of the emails where sent to the same recipients meaning that you could have received their mailing on a daily base for more than two weeks if MX Lab didn’t block them accordingly.

These guys send now from a new domain emailing-direct.org. As always a quick visit to a site gives us an ‘under construction’ web site.

The first paragraph under the many images seems to have an unsubscribe link: “Vous avez été invité, mais conformement à la loi sur la confiance dans l’économie numérique, si vous ne souhaitez plus recevoir des propositions par email de la part de Emailing-Direct pour le compte de FashionShopping.com veuillez cliquer sur le lien suivant : Désinscription”.

However think link gives us the error “Unsubscribe links do not work inside a preview message. In order to test unsubscribe links you will need to do a campaign” on the website http://www.my-login.net/z_oocode_129168_oocode_z.php. A visit to the root of this site gives us a login to an control panel of Expedite Simplicity, email & mobile marketing software.

The second paragraph: “We support responsible and ethical email marketing practices. Please know that we respect your right to be purged from this marketing campaign. Removal from this email distribution list is automatically enforced by our email delivery system. Please click here to start the process for email deletion”.

This will lead us to http://emailing-direct.org/index.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/*************.aspx and yes, here we have an unsubscribe form. You can even contact them at “Emailing Direct - 66, Avenue Des Champs Elysées - Paris, FR 75008 FR. So, they have moved from mailing house EmailVision to this company. Did EmailVision received too many complaints?

A WHOIS search on Netsol for emailing-direct.org gives us some results. The domain is registered to Emailing Direct in Paris, France. The registrant contact email address is admin@emailing-direct.com. When visiting their site we get a nice web site.

A short contact with this ‘company’ learns us that you can get mailings for a minimum fee of € 500. This includes sending out 500.000 emails at € 0,001 per message in a fully managed campaign.

It is clear that pushing your email based campaigns to the limit isn’t always a good thing. Some general tips when you are into email marketing:

• send from an authorised source, don’t spoof your from address,
• use your own address, no Gmail or others please, so that subscribers can view the source and can contact you directly
• make sure that your message has unsubscribe links that work and that remove an email address of the list immediatly
• send your campaign weekly, monthly,… which is much more accepted by your audience
• create your content with care (do not only include images but combine with text)

This mailing was send 3 times on a row with an interval of approx a day. Two days later I get a new mailing from FashionShopping.com. When browsing through the global logs at  MX Lab, I see a smiliar behaviour towards other domains. This is quite an anoying behaviour if you ask me.

Intriged by this case I examine the HTML source and unsubscribe link. I decided to take action to see what will happen. The unsubscribe request is followed by a confirmation. So far so good.

To take it even to a higher level, I submitted the campaign as an abuse case to  the company EmailVision that performs the service for FashionShopping.com as an abuse case. They seems a genuine company to me based on the high quality web site they have.

The mailing was sent too often and according to Belgian laws this company has no opt-in confirmation from me to use the email addresses they target. Not that the Belgian law will be respected by foreign marketing campaigns but okay.

Case closed I thought, I got an unsubscribe confirmation on my screen and stated my complaint.

Until yesterday I receive a new mailing from FashionShopping.com. And today another one. I’m not the only one who is receiving the same over and over again, clients at MX Lab receive the same mailing again.

What is different? Their sending email address is now invitation@fashionshopping.onlineresponse.net. The domain onlineresponse.net has no web site so this is a dummy domain they use to avoid filters based on the senders details. Why else would you change your sending address? If you send out mailings you make sure that you have a sending address that  you keep so that recipients can whitelist it to avoid interception by their spam filters. No?

You can see this kind of tricks a lot by so-called “email marketing” companies that keeps on sending the same mailing each time from a different domain. By doing this they still can keep on mailing you because your unsubscribe request was for a different campaign/domain. The unsubscribe in this case is still handled by the same company so we give it the benefit of the doubt. 

The Emailvision web site states “Emailvision only supports permission-based marketing practices. Since our inception in 1999 and before any anti-spam legislation had been introduced, Emailvision has always had a zero spam tolerance policy.” and furthermore “ If you believe you may have received an unsolicited commercial email from Emailvision on behalf of any of our clients, please click here to fill out the form including full details of the “from address” or sender of the email. Emailvision thoroughly investigates any complaint. If the email address of the complainant is known, it will be immediately unsubscribed from the relevant client mailing list.“

Okay, I have made my conclusions.