News International Under Scrutiny for Routine Email Deletion Requests

A technology firm told members of British Parliament that its client, News International, requested the deletion of hundreds of thousands of emails since April, 2010.

The firm, India-based HCL, revealed this information in a letter to the Home Affairs Select Committee of U.K. Parliament, which is investigating News International over the phone hacking scandal.

In the letter [PDF], HCL lists nine times it was asked to delete emails between April 2010 and July 2011.

HCL handles the live email systems for News International. That means that the vast majority of emails it manages were sent during the last 15 days. Messages older than 15 days are managed by a different provider. In essence, HCL helps deal with situations that are beyond the client support desk’s skills.

Most of the deletion requests appear to be normal email management tasks. One request, in April 2010, for instance, was to delete more than 200,000 delivery failure messages. In this incident, HCL says that the messages were successfully removed by the News International help desk before HCL could do anything.

Other requests covered common email maintenance tasks like deleting public folders or clearing clogged outboxes. If you have ever managed a mail system for a large organization, you know it can often require lots of tweaks.

The only incidents that could raise questions about News International’s intentions would be those in September 2010 and January 2011, when HCL was asked about deleting historical email.

In the first case, HCL was asked to work with a third party vendor to delete archived email from News International’s systems. The rationale by News International was that cleaning up the archived databases for the mail servers would make email more reliable and more manageable.

In January 2011, News International asked HCL if it would be able to truncate an email database — that is, delete or compress parts of the data in the database. HCL was unable to do this and told News International to talk to a third-party vendor.

We’ve already seen so many ethical lapses in the phone hacking scandal, it’s easy to immediately look at any requests for email deletion, no matter how innocuous, with suspicion.

That’s certainly how some of the British MP’s see the situation. The Guardian quotes one member of Parliament as saying, “It certainly looks as if … News International were deliberately thwarting their investigation.”

In a statement, News International said that “[it] keeps backups of its core systems and, in close co-operation with the (police’s) Operation Weeting team, has been working to restore these backups.”

View the original article here

Read More

Advanced Email Marketing for Bloggers – How To Track Downloads

This is part nine of my series on advanced email marketing for bloggers. In case you missed the past articles or need a refresher course. Here are the links to the past posts:

If you have followed this advanced email marketing series, then you know I’m a big fan of the Aweber Email Analytics features. These powerful tools allow you to target your list with pinpoint accuracy, sending messages that respond to subscriber activity.

Anywhere you install Aweber analytics, you can track which of your subscribers visit that page. You can send email newsletters to subscribers who visit your order page, or who look at a specific page or product on your website.

Aweber has recently taken things a step further, allowing you to track subscribers who click download links on your site.

How Does It Work?

Any download link on your website can be modified to track subscribers that use it. I’ll use a post about a free eBook from my friend Chris Brogan as an example.

This kind of page, with a free download, is the perfect place to implement download tracking. We could easily follow up with subscribers who downloaded the PDF, asking for feedback on the content in the download, linking to related products, or recommending a related product that’ll earn us an affiliate commission.

Let’s take a look at the HTML for that download link as it is now:

In order for the link to tell the AWeber analytics javascript that a subscriber has downloaded the PDF, we just add a line or two:

you can just copy and paste this code:

Download My PDF

Simply replace the “example.com” URL in BOTH places with the URL of your download, place this link on a page that has your AWeber analytics installed, and you’ll be good to go. When a subscriber clicks that link, it will be tracked as a page hit to the download.

What Is It For?

Now that we are tracking which subscribers are downloading the eBook, its time to put that information to work. We can now segment our list and send a message to those people.

To do so, we’ll first search our list for hits to the download’s URL – this is in our AWeber account, under the Subscribers tab, Search.

Next, we save this search as a segment so that we can refer to it later:

Now we can create a broadcast and send it out to that segment, directing their attention back to your site with links to similar resources, products for sale, or maybe just asking for input on the content of the PDF.

You can even segment out the subscribers who didn’t download your eBook and send them a different email asking how come they haven’t done it yet. This flexibility and pinpoint targeting will give you a much higher response rate and a much better reader experience.

Try Aweber for Only $1.00

Aweber is the best email service I have ever used. Their feature set is beyond anything else in the industry and the ability to track downloads is another reason why they’re the best.

Aweber offers a $1 trial account for all new customers. The account is just like a normal Aweber account and includes unlimited email campaigns, newsletter, broadcasts and follow ups. It’s a great way to test drive Aweber to see what it can do for your blog. Your satisfaction is guaranteed. If you find that having an email list is not for you, contact Aweber within 30 days and they’ll give you the $1 back.

View the original article here

Read More