If you send mass email messages, you probably see a lot of bouncebacks that look like this:

Remote host said: 550 SC-004 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons.

So what the heck does bounce code "550 SC-004" mean? The Email Experience Council's Deliverability Roundtable (Chris Wheeler of Bronto Software, Jack Sinclair of Return Path, and Josh Baer of OtherInbox) has put together a list of common email bounce codes to help decode why your emails might not be making it to their intended recipients.

Photo: Balakov 

Firstgiving is holding a free webinar TODAY designed to help nonprofits build their email lists,

What: Advanced Email Fundraising: Building Your List
When: Tuesday, January 13, at 3:30pm Eastern time.
Cost: Free
Description:

Email marketing isn't the wave of the future; it's the wave of right now. Writing effective messages is critical, but just as critical, and often overlooked, is building your list.

Join us in this practical and informative webinar about best practices for building and maintaining your organization's email list.

• Read more

Two interesting pieces of news this week have gotten me thinking about the future of office productivity software for nonprofits. First, Google has just added voice and video chat to its email service. Second, a new open-source Web application called OpenGoo has been released to the public.

A new study is suggesting that with spam filtering and perhaps user education, only a small percentage of spam gets opened or clicked on, or more precisely "less than 0.00001 per cent."

Researchers at UCSD took an admittedly "legally grey" approach by infiltrating a spam generating network and investigated how many responses they got from the spam they sent. Unfortunately given the amount of spam that is sent globally, even with such a small open and click-through rate, researchers extrapolate that the single spam network would still manage to make $7000/day, or $3.5 million a year.

So, do your part to make sure that your computer is not part of a spam network by running antivirus and antispyware programs, and update their definitions files regularly. It's also a good idea to talk to staff and volunteers using machines at your nonprofit to educate them about common spam and phishing subject lines and tactics so they can avoid clicking in the first place.

You can visit TechSoup's Security Corner for more information.

I've always found Idealware's webinars to be high-quality and informative. They're offering a free one on October 29 that they describe as follows:

Wednesday, Oct 29th, 1:00 - 2:30 EST

Web sites, email blasting, and social media can provide a small organization with big benefits without a huge investment. In this special FREE online seminar, we'll talk through the best practices and the low cost tools that can help you take advantage of the Internet to better serve your mission — without breaking your budget.

Free, interesting, and good: what's not to like?

CNN is not reporting that their CNN Custom News Alert is being spoofed by spammers — with sometimes outrageous story headlines — but they are. Just this morning, I had a variety of spammy emails using CNN's My Custom Alert banners and some sounded legitimate ("Officials work to ID remains from helicopter crash") and others definitely didn't ("Naked celebs will make your day").

Spywareremove has a detailed blog post about how the spam works to trick the user to downloading malware. The post also includes a simple but effective way to filter them as spam using Outlook rules. The spam's consistency makes it to filter.

Let's hope that those receiving these bogus emails are "alert" enough not be fooled to clicking the links.

**UPDATE: We misspoke when we said that CNN was not reporting the fraudulent spam generated in their name. They blogged about it last week and are directing people, appropriately, to delete the emails before opening.

Our friends over at Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog have given us the CliffsNotes version of a white paper recently released by Lyris HQ. The subject: Email Subject Lines: 15 Rules to Write Them Right. So, if you're like me and don't have a million hours in your day to read the full white paper, check out the summary on Katya's blog.

The white paper has some tried-and-true recommendations like "test, test, test" and "personalize" subject lines. One of my favorite tips is that "open rates don't necessarily measure subject-line success"—especially since it can be easy to get caught up in data metrics rather than looking at the real goals your organization is trying to achieve—like getting your constituents to take action, make a donation, or join your campaign.

Check it out, if only to give yourself some food for thought on how to improve your email subject lines and hopefully boost your campaigns.

Social network Care2.com has published an online calculator designed to help you measure the value of an online supporter. 

Below the calculator, you'll find a comparison chart so you can see how to stack up to other organizations like yours, as well as a discussion about the calendar and how it generates its data.

.........................................................

As organizations become increasingly reliant on email, the need to effectively deal with a full inbox is more pressing than ever. A recent article on ReadWriteWeb explores five strategies you can use to win control over your inbox.

Usability News, published by Wichita State University, reports on a research paper by A. Dawn Shaikh, Doug Fox, and Barbara S. Chaparro called "The Effect of Typeface on the Perception of Email." The purpose of the study was "to investigate the effect of selected typefaces on the perception of the email creator’s ethos and gender. In addition, the perceived personality of the email document was evaluated." 

The study rates perceptions of email senders' knowledge, professionalism, maturity, and trustworthiness, and the quality of the information presented based on the font used. The study suggests that "there is a relationship between typeface selection and the reader’s perception of an email.