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marketingtech · 9 years ago

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Explaining Spam Traps

This article was submitted to me, and the author allowed me to post it. The author would like to remain anonymous.

Issue: A. Company has hit two spam traps in the first 1,300 transactional emails it has sent. Spam traps indicate that an emailer is likely sending out unwanted email. Spam traps are a way of catching these spammers.

What is a spam trap?

A spam trap is a dormant email address. Spam traps begin as regular email addresses, then are closed down for whatever reason – a person stops using it and gives it back to the owner of the domain (i.e. Hotmail.com) or Hotmail creates a bunch of fake email addresses that it then shuts down for a year, etc. After that year of inactivity (no opens, no responses, etc.), the owner of that email address starts looking at the email it gets and labels that email as spam. They never respond to the emailer telling them they are getting spammed: if they did then it would be easy for spammers to avoid their spam traps.

Why is A. Company hitting spam traps if the email addresses it is getting are from its customers?

There are two main ways this happens:

1. The email address was given to A. Company a long time ago, it was closed at some point, and then the new owner turned it into a spam trap

2. A customer may have spelled their email address wrong. This happens much more often than you would think.

What should we do about it:

Short-term:

1. Use a solution like Experian Email Insights to scrub the customer database of email address. This solution has access to roughly 250,000,000,000 emails that have been sent over the last 12 months by the 200 largest emails senders. This establishes a strong record of which email addresses have been opening emails and which haven’t.

2. Initially only send to email addresses that have recently opened an email sent from A. Company. This will build up a good reputation with the ISPs and allow us to start sending emails out to new customers soon.

Long-term:

1. In addition to the scrubbing above, A. Company should implement a double-entry method when acquiring new customers. By forcing a person to enter their email address twice, and making sure it matches, the likelihood of a mistake Is much less.

2. There are some solutions available that will check in real-time if an address entered a website is correct.

3. A best practice is to also stop sending email to anyone who hasn’t opened an A. Company in the last 12 months, although this can be circumnavigated by good scrubbing.

What happens if we don’t do anything?

A. Company is already blocked by Hotmail. If we hit spam traps are other domains, they will likely shut us down as well. In addition, there is a global spam trap organization called Spamhaus. If a Spamhaus spam trap is hit or if enough ISPs block us, then Spamhaus will place A. Company on its Block List which all ISPs follow to identify spammers and A. Company will not be able to send any emails.

So, what should we do?

Since A. Company has already hit two spam traps with Hotmail, Hotmail may require A. Company to write up a plan indicating how it will do a better job ensuring the email addresses we send to are valid. Otherwise they may not unblock us at all. We can create a plan based upon the best practices described above, add some additional best practices in that the send ESP has suggested, submit that plan to Hotmail for approval, and make sure we follow it to get us back into good graces with Hotmail and to ensure that we won’t hit anymore spam traps.

#spam #spamtrap #email marketing #responsys #ibm #unica campaign #best practices

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marketingtech · 9 years ago

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marketingtech · 10 years ago

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Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client Error: Failed to initialize connection subsystem.

I have Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client (CASMC) on my Windows 8.1 machine and just went through a system update.

When I went to open up my CASMC VPN I ran in to the following error:

Cisco AnyConnect Failed to initialize connection subsystem.

How To Resolve The Issue:

1) Quit the Cisco AnyConnect application by right clicking on the CASMC icon in the notification area

2) Navigate to the Cisco AnyConnect directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\Cisco\Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client\

3) Locate vpnui.exe

4) Right click on vpnui.exe and select properties

5) Click the compatibility tab

6) Change to: Windows 7, or Windows 8 (for me Win 7 worked, for others Win 8 worked)

#Cisco #vpn #network #error #remote connection #windows 8 #windows 7 #microsoft

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marketingtech · 11 years ago

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How to Concatenate and Left Pad (Oracle SQL LPAD) Strings in Unica Campaign Flowchart

A question was asked on IBM's Unica Campaign developerWorks how one could concatenate different numbers and strings such that some of the numbers were left padded.

Unfortunately Unica Campaign Macros do not have a simple "LPAD" function; therefore, there are two ways to solve this problem:

Use STRING_CONCAT and define your own LPAD Unica Macro

Use STRING_CONCAT and use Unica Macro FORMAT

To make this example more readable I am going to modify the request by adding underscores as a requirement between the concatenated fields:

Example Output:

7568021506373990_02798_000000001_00412_00000000008_67741_0064135452014082_000000402|000000316800

Generalized Output:

(Kundendaten is composed from other fields)

The Main Question is:

How Does One Generate an Left Padded (zero fill to the left with n digits/characters)?

In other words, how does one turn "1" into "000000001"?

To Start:

The generalized function for padding is:

FORMAT(<FIELD_NAME>,<STRING_LENGTH>,<PRECISION>,<FORMAT_TYPE>,<FIELD_PULL_DIRECTION>,<PADDING_FILLER>)

In the following set, I will assume that we are dealing with 10 character string lengths, and will leave it to the user to either remove, or modify the padding if needed.

FORMAT(landcode,10,0,ZERO,RIGHT,ZERO)

FORMAT(postcode,10,0,ZERO,RIGHT,ZERO)

FORMAT(Datamix,10,0,ZERO,RIGHT,ZERO)

FORMAT(RefNummer,10,0,ZERO,RIGHT,ZERO)

FORMAT(Treatmentcode,10,0,ZERO,RIGHT,ZERO)

FORMAT(Sendungsnummer,10,0,ZERO,RIGHT,ZERO)

FORMAT(ID_Absender,10,0,ZERO,RIGHT,ZERO)

FORMAT(Kundendaten,10,0,ZERO,RIGHT,ZERO)

After the individual items have been formatted the user can then concatenate (STRING_CONCAT) them together:

STRING_CONCAT( FORMAT(landcode,10,0,ZERO,RIGHT,ZERO), '_', FORMAT(postcode,10,0,ZERO,RIGHT,ZERO), '_', FORMAT(Datamix,10,0,ZERO,RIGHT,ZERO), '_', FORMAT(RefNummer,10,0,ZERO,RIGHT,ZERO), '_', FORMAT(Treatmentcode,10,0,ZERO,RIGHT,ZERO), '_', FORMAT(Sendungsnummer,10,0,ZERO,RIGHT,ZERO), '_', FORMAT(ID_Absender,10,0,ZERO,RIGHT,ZERO), '_', FORMAT(Kundendaten,10,0,ZERO,RIGHT,ZERO) )

Thanks to one of my coworkers for helping me troubleshoot this

#unica campaign #ibm #strings #concatenate #left padding #lpad #oracle sql #functions #macros #smarter commerce

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marketingtech · 11 years ago

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Testing the Submit Something Page

Is this really the best way to get multiple contributors?

#yellatmarissa

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marketingtech · 11 years ago

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Missing Data From Unica Mail List Output

The following was written by a team mate (I made a few edits to hide names). Once I get permission to display the author's name, I will.

Issue:

Output files were missing the subject lines data field, even though they were added using the mail list process.

Cause:

There were two Subject Line attributes, one offer attribute and one cell attribute with the same system name (which was defined while creating the custom attribute).

Background:

The target cell spreadsheet was extended the to include custom offer attributes and we created a new Cell attribute (Subject Line). Ideally Unica should handle Offer and Cell attributes differently, but since the same system name was used for both attributes it broke our process resulting in null subject lines in mail list exports.

Resolve:

Change the system name & name (optional) of the new subject line attribute created. Unica campaign generated fields (UCGF.xxxx) reference the system name and thus it’s important for them to be unique.

Lessons Learned:

Exercise caution when creating new custom attributes or have the Admin do it:

Ensure than system name for the attribute is unique

Attributes can’t be deleted or retired from the UI, so as an option - if you need to retire an attribute, add a suffix (or a prefix) to the end of the system name (e.g. subjectLine_DONOTUSE).

Maintain a production change log.

#UNICA #unica campaign #offer attributes #ibm

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marketingtech · 11 years ago

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NFC Championship: 49ers have a 13% chance of playing at Candlestick again

@49ers have a 13% chance of playing at Candlestick again. #NFLPlayoffs #49ers #candlestick pic.twitter.com/dSp9lX5nNi

— matt robles (@misterMGR) January 8, 2014

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marketingtech · 12 years ago

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Another UNIX Question - grep

I posted a question in my UNIX class, the question is as follows:

Consider the File:

11/04/2013 16:04:28.708 (28251) [D] [CELL ACC] [Snapshot1_1] IGNORE ME 11/05/2013 16:04:28.708 (28252) [D] [CELL ACC] [Snapshot1_2] IGNORE ME 11/04/2013 16:04:28.708 (28251) [D] [CELL ACC] [Snapshot1_1] SELECT * FROM CMDM.CMDM_USER_D 11/05/2013 16:04:28.708 (28252) [D] [CELL ACC] [Snapshot1_2] CMDM.CMDD_ORDER_D 11/06/2013 16:04:28.708 (28256) [D] [CELL ACC] [Snapshot3_1] CMDM.CMDM_DATE_D 11/06/2013 16:04:28.708 (28256) [D] [CELL ACC] [Snapshot3_2] CMDM.CMDM_DATE_D 11/07/2013 16:04:28.708 (28251) [D] [CELL ACC] [Snapshot1_1] IGNORE ME 11/08/2013 16:04:28.708 (28252) [D] [CELL ACC] [Snapshot1_2] IGNORE ME

I can do:

grep "CMDM.CMDM" /path/to/directory/file > /path/to/output/file

Which Outputs:

11/04/2013 16:04:28.708 (28251) [D] [CELL ACC] [Snapshot1_1] SELECT * FROM CMDM.CMDM_USER_D 11/05/2013 16:04:28.708 (28252) [D] [CELL ACC] [Snapshot1_2] CMDM.CMDD_ORDER_D 11/06/2013 16:04:28.708 (28256) [D] [CELL ACC] [Snapshot3_1] CMDM.CMDM_DATE_D 11/06/2013 16:04:28.708 (28256) [D] [CELL ACC] [Snapshot3_2] CMDM.CMDM_DATE_D

This is easy, but I am not interested in all of the information, I want to only output the words that contain "CMDM.CMDM". On top of that, I would also like to remove duplicates, so that I end up with a list similar to:

CMDM.CMDM_USER_D CMDM.CMDD_ORDER_D CMDM.CMDM_DATE_D

Instead of:

My Instructor's Answer Is As Follows

Here is the command you need:

grep -o "CMDM.CMD.*" /path/to/directory/file | uniq > /path/to/output/file

The key is the -o option which just displays the word from the line that matches the pattern. Because this returns just a word, the use of the meta characters dot asterisk .* becomes critical. This combination of wildcards tells grep to search for CMDM.CMD plus anything that may follow that pattern in the same word, like CMDM.CMDM_USER_D or CMDM.CMDD_ORDER_D

Note that your original grep would not find CMDM.CMDD_ORDER_D because it would not match the literal "CMDM.CMDM" That is why I removed that last M before attaching the .* to the pattern.

The uniq command takes input from grep's results and only outputs non-duplicates. Here is the ouput for the command above given your sample data:

CMDM.CMDM_USER_D CMDM.CMDD_ORDER_D CMDM.CMDM_DATE_D

#unix #grep #flatfile #Foothill Community College

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marketingtech · 12 years ago

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From My Unix 101 Class

A quick guide to writing scripts using the bash shell

A simple shell script

A shell script is little more than a list of commands that are run in sequence. Conventionally, a shellscript should start with a line such as the following:

#!/bin/bash

THis indicates that the script should be run in the bash shell regardless of which interactive shell the user has chosen. This is very important, since the syntax of different shells can vary greatly.

A simple example

Here's a very simple example of a shell script. It just runs a few simple commands

#!/bin/bash echo "hello, $USER. I wish to list some files of yours" echo "listing files in the current directory, $PWD" ls # list files

Firstly, notice the comment on line 4. In a bash script, anything following a pound sign # (besides the shell name on the first line) is treated as a comment. ie the shell ignores it. It is there for the benifit of people reading the script.

$USER and $PWD are variables. These are standard variables defined by the bash shell itself, they needn't be defined in the script. Note that the variables are expanded when the variable name is inside double quotes. Expanded is a very appropriate word: the shell basically sees the string $USER and replaces it with the variable's value then executes the command.

We continue the discussion on variables below ...

Variables

Any programming language needs variables. You define a variable as follows:

X="hello"

and refer to it as follows:

More specifically, $X is used to denote the value of the variable X. Some things to take note of regarding semantics:

bash gets unhappy if you leave a space on either side of the = sign. For example, the following gives an error message:

X = hello

while I have quotes in my example, they are not always necessary. where you need quotes is when your variable names include spaces. For example,

X=hello world # error X="hello world" # OK

This is because the shell essentially sees the command line as a pile of commands and command arguments seperated by spaces. foo=baris considered a command. The problem with foo = bar is the shell sees the word foo seperated by spaces and interprets it as a command. Likewise, the problem with the command X=hello world is that the shell interprets X=hello as a command, and the word "world" does not make any sense (since the assignment command doesn't take arguments).

Single Quotes versus double quotes

Basically, variable names are exapnded within double quotes, but not single quotes. If you do not need to refer to variables, single quotes are good to use as the results are more predictable.

An example

#!/bin/bash echo -n '$USER=' # -n option stops echo from breaking the line echo "$USER" echo "\$USER=$USER" # this does the same thing as the first two lines

The output looks like this (assuming your username is elflord)

$USER=elflord $USER=elflord

so the double quotes still have a work around. Double quotes are more flexible, but less predictable. Given the choice between single quotes and double quotes, use single quotes.

Using Quotes to enclose your variables

Sometimes, it is a good idea to protect variable names in double quotes. This is usually the most important if your variables value either (a) contains spaces or (b) is the empty string. An example is as follows:

#!/bin/bash X="" if [ -n $X ]; then # -n tests to see if the argument is non empty echo "the variable X is not the empty string" fi

This script will give the following output:

the variable X is not the empty string

Why ? because the shell expands $X to the empty string. The expression [ -n ] returns true (since it is not provided with an argument). A better script would have been:

#!/bin/bash X="" if [ -n "$X" ]; then # -n tests to see if the argument is non empty echo "the variable X is not the empty string" fi

In this example, the expression expands to [ -n "" ] which returns false, since the string enclosed in inverted commas is clearly empty.

Variable Expansion in action

Just to convince you that the shell really does "expand" variables in the sense I mentioned before, here is an example:

#!/bin/bash LS="ls" LS_FLAGS="-al" $LS $LS_FLAGS $HOME

This looks a little enigmatic. What happens with the last line is that it actually executes the command

ls -al /home/elflord

(assuming that /home/elflord is your home directory). That is, the shell simply replaces the variables with their values, and then executes the command.

Using Braces to Protect Your Variables

OK. Here's a potential problem situation. Suppose you want to echo the value of the variable X, followed immediately by the letters "abc". Question: how do you do this ? Let's have a try :

#!/bin/bash X=ABC echo "$Xabc"

THis gives no output. What went wrong ? The answer is that the shell thought that we were asking for the variable Xabc, which is uninitialised. The way to deal with this is to put braces around X to seperate it from the other characters. The following gives the desired result:

#!/bin/bash X=ABC echo "${X}abc"

Conditionals, if/then/elif

Sometimes, it's necessary to check for certain conditions. Does a string have 0 length ? does the file "foo" exist, and is it a symbolic link , or a real file ? Firstly, we use the if command to run a test. The syntax is as follows:

if condition then statement1 statement2 .......... fi

Sometimes, you may wish to specify an alternate action when the condition fails. Here's how it's done.

if condition then statement1 statement2 .......... else statement3 fi

alternatively, it is possible to test for another condition if the first "if" fails. Note that any number of elifs can be added.

if condition1 then statement1 statement2 .......... elif condition2 then statement3 statement4 ........ elif condition3 then statement5 statement6 ........ fi

The statements inside the block between if/elif and the next elif or fi are executed if the corresponding condition is true. Actually, any command can go in place of the conditions, and the block will be executed if and only if the command returns an exit status of 0 (in other words, if the command exits "succesfully" ). However, in the course of this document, we will be only interested in using "test" or "[ ]" to evaluate conditions.

The Test Command and Operators

The command used in conditionals nearly all the time is the test command. Test returns true or false (more accurately, exits with 0 or non zero status) depending respectively on whether the test is passed or failed. It works like this:

test operand1 operator operand2

for some tests, there need be only one operand (operand2) The test command is typically abbreviated in this form:

[ operand1 operator operand2 ]

To bring this discussion back down to earth, we give a few examples:

#!/bin/bash X=3 Y=4 empty_string="" if [ $X -lt $Y ] # is $X less than $Y ? then echo "\$X=${X}, which is smaller than \$Y=${Y}" fi if [ -n "$empty_string" ]; then echo "empty string is non_empty" fi if [ -e "${HOME}/.fvwmrc" ]; then # test to see if ~/.fvwmrc exists echo "you have a .fvwmrc file" if [ -L "${HOME}/.fvwmrc" ]; then # is it a symlink ? echo "it's a symbolic link elif [ -f "${HOME}/.fvwmrc" ]; then # is it a regular file ? echo "it's a regular file" fi else echo "you have no .fvwmrc file" fi

Some pitfalls to be wary of

The test command needs to be in the form "operand1<space>operator<space>operand2" or operator<space>operand2 , in other words you really need these spaces, since the shell considers the first block containing no spaces to be either an operator (if it begins with a '-') or an operand (if it doesn't). So for example; this

if [ 1=2 ]; then echo "hello" fi

gives exactly the "wrong" output (ie it echos "hello", since it sees an operand but no operator.)

Another potential trap comes from not protecting variables in quotes. We have already given an example as to why you must wrap anything you wish to use for a -n test with quotes. However, there are a lot of good reasons for using quotes all the time, or almost all of the time. Failing to do this when you have variables expanded inside tests can result in very wierd bugs. Here's an example: For example,

#!/bin/bash X="-n" Y="" if [ $X = $Y ] ; then echo "X=Y" fi

This will give misleading output since the shell expands our expression to

[ -n = ]

and the string "=" has non zero length.

A brief summary of test operators

Here's a quick list of test operators. It's by no means comprehensive, but its likely to be all you'll need to remember (if you need anything else, you can always check the bash manpage ... ) operatorproduces true if... number of operands -noperand non zero length1 -zoperand has zero length1 -dthere exists a directory whose name is operand1 -fthere exists a file whose name is operand1 -eqthe operands are integers and they are equal2 -neqthe opposite of -eq2 =the operands are equal (as strings)2 !=opposite of = 2 -ltoperand1 is strictly less than operand2 (both operands should be integers)2 -gtoperand1 is strictly greater than operand2 (both operands should be integers)2 -geoperand1 is greater than or equal to operand2 (both operands should be integers)2 -leoperand1 is less than or equal to operand2 (both operands should be integers)2

Loops

Loops are constructions that enable one to reiterate a procedure or perform the same procedure on several different items. There are the following kinds of loops available in bash

for loops

while loops

For loops

The syntax for the for loops is best demonstrated by example.

#!/bin/bash for X in red green blue do echo $X done

THe for loop iterates the loop over the space seperated items. Note that if some of the items have embedded spaces, you need to protect them with quotes. Here's an example:

#!/bin/bash colour1="red" colour2="light blue" colour3="dark green" for X in "$colour1" $colour2" $colour3" do echo $X done

Can you guess what would happen if we left out the quotes in the for statement ? This indicates that variable names should be protected with quotes unless you are pretty sure that they do not contain any spaces.

Globbing in for loops

The shell expands a string containing a * to all filenames that "match". A filename matches if and only if it is identical to the match string after replacing the stars * with arbitrary strings. For example, the character "*" by itself expands to a space seperated list of all files in the working directory (excluding those that start with a dot "." ) So

echo *

lists all the files and directories in the current directory.

echo *.jpg

lists all the jpeg files.

echo ${HOME}/public_html/*.jpg

lists all jpeg files in your public_html directory.

As it happens, this turns out to be very useful for performing operations on the files in a directory, especially used in conjunction with a for loop. For example:

#!/bin/bash for X in *.html do grep -L '<UL>' "$X" done

While Loops

While loops iterate "while" a given condition is true. An example of this:

#!/bin/bash X=0 while [ $X -le 20 ] do echo $X X=$((X+1)) done

This raises a natural question: why doesn't bash allow the C like for loops

for (X=1,X<10; X++)

As it happens, this is discouraged for a reason: bash is an interpreted language, and a rather slow one for that matter. For this reason, heavy iteration is discouraged.

Command Substitution

Command Substitution is a very handy feature of the bash shell. It enables you to take the output of a command and treat it as though it was written on the command line. For example, if you want to set the variable X to the output of a command, the way you do this is via command substitution.

There are two means of command substitution: brace expansion and backtick expansion.

Brace expansion workls as follows: $(commands) expands to the output of commands This permits nesting, so commands can include brace expansions

Backtick expansion expands `commands` to the output of commands

An example is given;:

#!/bin/bash files="$(ls)" web_files=`ls public_html` echo "$files" # we need the quotes to preserve embedded newlines in $files echo "$web_files" # we need the quotes to preserve newlines X=`expr 3 \* 2 + 4` # expr evaluate arithmatic expressions. man expr for details. echo "$X"

The advantage of the $() substitution method is almost self evident: it is very easy to nest. It is supported by most of the bourne shell varients (the POSIX shell or better is OK). However, the backtick substitution is slightly more readable, and is supported by even the most basic shells (any #!/bin/sh version is just fine)

Note that if strings are not quote-protected in the above echo statement, new lines are replaced by spaces in the output.

#unix #shell script #foothill community college

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