Tech group needs to junk spam emails

Conference call company Via-Vox is losing customers and business because of a problem with computer software, writes Philip Smith.

Hot line: Paul Lees and Andrew Pearce are hoping to extend the global reach of their telecoms business, Via-Vox Photo: Philip Hollis

Andrew Pearce and Paul Lees have had a pretty good past five years. Despite the recession, their business, based in Richmond, Surrey, which facilitates conference calls, has seen its market share grow to 3pc, generating a £5m turnover.

There is still a long way to go, though, before Via-Vox can really claim that its Powwownow brand is a true challenger to the industry giants. And the pair, majority owners in the business, know that despite an estimated 30pc annual growth, the conference call market will eventually plateau.

They have plans, such as developing video conferencing and expanding its overseas sales. Via-Vox already has its service operating in 15 countries across Europe and the US, and it has just rolled out to South Africa.

Powwownow, say the joint chief executives, is cheaper and easier to use than other conference call services. "It's about a third of the price," says Pearce. Customers can book a call via the Powwownow website with a cost of 5p per minute for each participant, of which about 4p goes to Powwownow (the balance to the relevant telecoms company). The cost is added to the normal bill and, as there are no contracts, it is easy for anyone in a company to organise.

"We have about 4,000 unique visitors a week to the site, which generates 500 new customers," adds Pearce. "We target mostly small and medium-sized businesses and small corporates, but we do have some larger customers such as BAA, BA and T-Mobile." More than half the customers come from referrals, with online advertising generating the rest.

Having invested £500,000 in the kit needed to become a fully-fledged telecoms company, with the credentials and credibility to be able to link directly into the BT network, Via-Vox is well placed to realise its goal and grab a larger slice of the £200m UK market and roll out overseas.

But life is not simple at Via-Vox. It faces a problem that many businesses come up against: how to make sure its all-important email communications to customers get through to their customers' in-box and not end up junked as spam by ever aggressive server-based filters.

"It costs us about £30 a get a new customer," says Pearce, 38, "and we have to send an instant email with login details and a PIN number," – important details to enable a conference call to happen. But the level of calls to the company's help line shows just how many emails never arrive. "These are not sales messages. This is information the customer needs," adds Pearce. "But 5pc have to be resent; we know that because they call the help desk. And they are the ones that we do know about. If 5pc are calling us to get the email resent, how many are not calling?"

Pearce says that 30pc of booked calls never take place, and the fear is that some of that dropout – and resulting loss of revenue – may be due to emails going astray. "We know they are sent because we blind copy all emails to ourselves. So not only are we losing customers, but it's a complete waste of money."

"We don't know why the emails are being junked. What we really need is somewhere we can send the emails to test against the various filters," says Lees, 47. It may be a word, a phrase, an embedded image or even a link that causes the spam filtering software to reject the email.

The staff of 26 include some serious techies, so it's not as though Via-Vox is a novice when it comes to technology.
What baffles Pearce and Lees is that each day thousands of spam emails do get past the filters, such as those selling Viagra or replica watches.

"Then there are big companies such as Amazon and eBay who don't seem to have a problem," adds Lees. "How do they do it? They must employ teams to find the solution. But the companies, such as Messagelabs and Mailwasher who build the spam filters are also employing teams to fine tune the filters. It's becoming a bit like an arms race."
It's not that Via-Vox is against anti spam filters, they perform an important role, says Lees, but "for little people like us, it is a real problem".

Those service critical emails only highlight the issue. Via-Vox also runs a number of CRM campaigns, a newsletter and service updates via email. Customers – it has 100,000 registered users – receive an average of one email a month, assuming they are not junked. "That's another question, what is the optimum frequency for email contact?" asks Lees. 

Expert views on conference call company Via-Vox's spam email issues

Three business experts give their advice on how conference call company Via-Vox can resolve its spam filters issue which is losing them customers.

Simon Dolph, Director, Chartered Management Institute
There are a lot of free online tools that Andrew Pearce and Paul Lees can use to ensure their customer emails get past the spam filters.
Not only are there lists of the top 200 trigger words the filters use but there is also software that examines an email before it goes and suggests changes that need to be made – Sitesell’s Spam Check tool is one.
There are agencies that specialise in emailing and which use both sophisticated technology and have good relationships with the likes of Yahoo! and Google. But it’s not foolproof and, as Mr Pearce and Mr Lees point out, while larger companies may have the funds to throw at ensuring all email communication gets through, many smaller ones don’t.
So the simple solution is not to use emails at all. SMS messaging is far more resilient as it has yet to be widely attacked by spam. So apart from optimising the emails for use on handhelds (which don’t suffer from the same spam filters), they could simply send a text saying the information has been sent and to contact Via-Vox if it doesn’t arrive.

Robert Smart, Emerging technologies, IBM UK
A suggestion for Via-Vox is to add a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) entry to its Domain Name System (DNS) record. This is a small but important piece of textual information held by the DNS server that lists the names of servers in your network that email can legitimately be sent from.
Spam filter solutions are increasingly performing SPF checks when they receive email, so an email sent from user@via-vox.com via the server mail.via-vox.com will result in the spam filter software checking the DNS record for an SPF entry that names mail.via-vox.com. If the filter doesn’t find this entry it may reject the email, this could account for the 5pc of email being lost.
Correct configuration of email servers is vital. Mistakes here can result in messages being bounced or marked as probable spam before a filter even looks at the content.
Any email that is bounced back should be recorded in the logs of your server along with the reason given by the recipient’s email server. This information will provide valuable clues to anything that is incorrectly configured.

Simon West, Director, Nett Sales
Email deliverability is a big subject and one that most companies are only just waking up to. It’s not just about individual company spam filters, but if you get on the wrong side of Hotmail or Gmail, you can find your email blocked to all their millions of users. But you’re not on any blacklists and the emails I received from your site came through with a negative spam score (good).There are three things you can do immediately that will improve your deliverability.
Firstly, remove the embedded image you send in each message or send your messages as plain text – spam filters don’t like embedded images and can be funny about too much html in an email.
Secondly, get individual users to add you to their “whitelist”.
Thirdly, authenticate your servers using domain authentication, SPF and/or become Return Path Certified.
All of these add to your reputation as a “safe sender”. As for the frequency of email newsletters, I recommend sending them about every three weeks at different times of the day and different days of the week.