Courtesy of Think Geek (who have some of the best use of symbols in subject lines I’ve seen).
December 9, 2012
Fun with Subject lines
09December
December 6, 2012
Hotmail moves to SPF authentication
06December
Hotmail has recently stopped using Sender ID for email authentication and switched to authenticating with SPF. The protocol differences between SenderID and SPF were subtle and most senders who were getting a pass at Hotmail were already publishing SPF records. From an email in my inbox from September: Authentication-Results: hotmail.com; sender-id=pass (sender IP is 65.55.240.72) header...
December 5, 2012
Data, data, elections and data
05December
One of the interesting stories coming out of the recent US Presidential election is how much data the Obama Campaign collected about voters, volunteers and donors. Today Politico talks about how valuable that data is, and how many Democrats want to get their hands on it.
December 4, 2012
Confirmation Fails
04December
Yesterday I talked about registration confirmations. Today I’m going to talk about a couple recent experiences with websites and their registration failures. The first experience was with Yelp. One of my readers decided I needed a Yelp account and created one using my laura-questions email address. Yelp understands that people will be jerks and so sent me an email to confirm the account. Hi...
December 4, 2012
An interesting look at best practices
Which best practice is ruining your business?
December 3, 2012
Confirming website registrations
03December
Confirming email addresses during a website registration process is a good practice. It stops people from creating fake accounts, abusing resources and using that site as a mechanism for harassment. But simply sending out a confirmation mail is not sufficient to prevent problems, particularly when everything about the process assumes that unconfirmed registrations are actually valid and not...
November 30, 2012
What a week!
30November
It has been quite an insane and busy week here. So I share with you what’s kept me going much of the week. Happy weekend. Next week I’ll have a multi-part series on confirming email addresses and some major companies trying to do the right thing with subscriptions, but failing. EDIT: Excuse any typos. Amelia has decided she doesn’t want to be a good cat and instead wants to walk...
November 29, 2012
Q3 Email intelligence report from Return Path
29November
Return Path released their 3rd quarter email intelligence report this week. And the numbers aren’t looking that great for marketers. Complaints are a major problem for commercial mailers. In the data Return Path examined, commercial mail made up 18% of the total inbox volume. That same mail accounted for 70% of all email complaints. Additionally, 60% of the email sent to spamtraps was...
November 28, 2012
DKIM and Gmail
28November
After they were a a little embarrassed by their own DKIM keys being poorly managed a few months ago, Google seem to have been going through their inbound DKIM handling and tightening up on their validation so that badly signed mail that really shouldn’t be treated as DKIM signed, won’t be treated as signed by Gmail. This is a good thing, especially as things like DMARC start to be...
November 27, 2012
Spammers are funny
27November
Dear Spammer, If you are going to send me an email that claims it complies with the Federal CAN SPAM act of 2003, it would be helpful if the mail actually complies with CAN SPAM. In this case, however, you are sending to an address you’ve harvested off my website. The mail you are sending does not contain a physical postal email address. You’re also forging headers. Both of those...
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