You may have seen in the news recently a case from the Federal Trade Commission, where they charged an online lead generation company, Adteractive with violations of the CAN-SPAM act because the company failed to disclose to consumers that their apparently “free” promotions actually required the consumer to incur a cost. The company settled with the FTC and agreed to pay a civic penalty of $650,000, as well as have the FTC monitor their activities.

The significance of this case is clear when you consider the subject lines and content found in advertising emails. One of the main provisions of the CAN-SPAM act prohibits “deceptive subject lines”, or in other words, the subject line cannot mislead the recipient about the contents or subject matter of the message. In the case of Adteractive, because the subject lines of their email messages implied that the reader had won a contest, or were specially selected for a promotion, the company failed to clearly and conspicuously disclose that the recipient would incur expenses by participating in the program.

As this is the first case of its kind from the FTC, this serves as a signal to marketers that they may be liable for “deceptiveness in advertising”, depending on the subject lines and content of their messages. Here are just a few examples of advertising categories and deceptive subject lines that could raise red flags:

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I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. Being the New Year, a lot of us are making New Year’s resolutions. If you haven’t come up with a resolution, I have a great suggestion:

Please authenticate your email using DomainKeys.

While Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and SenderID have become mainstream methods of authenticating email, DomainKeys still seems to be in obscurity. It is amazing to me that I receive emails from large Fortune 500 level companies, yet none of them are using DomainKeys — not even email coming from:

• Airlines
• Banks
• Travel Agents
• Worldwide shipping companies
• Car Rental Companies
• Home improvement stores

All these companies have multi-million dollar budgets to spend on advertising and technology – but haven’t implemented this free and incredibly powerful authentication system. Here’s why they should care:

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Most people I talk to these days have several email addresses—one for work, one for home, one for the kids, etc. Being in the email business, I have lots of addressees—but then again, I’m kind of weird like that.

Another common email address that people sometimes have is a “spam” address, or one that they use to get all of their unsolicited email. The logic is that if they are worried about the potential email they are going to receive, they can simply have a message sent to an address:

• For which they don’t care about what gets delivered.
• That they most likely won’t check very often.

This creates a number of scenarios for senders:

1. As this is a “throw-away” account, there is a good possibility that a sender’s email may actually not be read for weeks, months, or at all.
2. The user may, after time, abandon that email address, and not elect to inform anyone who has been sending messages there.
3. With abandoned emails, ISPs will temporarily deactivate an account that has had no activity for a period of months. If the user does not reactivate it, the ISP will eventually turn that address into a “spam trap” (which I will discuss in my next blog). Thus, not only are a sender’s messages not being read; the messages are also being fed directly into an ISP’s spam filter, affecting reputation and deliverability.

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Our CEO, Jared Reitzin wrote a great article for DM News a few days ago about the importance of sender reputation and how it can affect successful email deliverability. Among the items discussed were suggestions around lowering complaint rates, list hygiene, branding and relevancy. In addition to these recommendations, I would like to note something else that I have found a lot of clients either don’t understand, or even know about, ISP whitelisting and feeback loop programs.

While it sometimes is hard to believe, ISPs really do want to try and work with legitimate senders to get their messages delivered to the Inbox. As such, some of them offer whitelisting and feedback loop programs to not only give priority to senders that qualify, but also give sender a chance to clean up their subscriber lists and remove those that don’t want to receive their messages. Here’s how the two programs work:

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