ArchiveAugust 2017

A decade of blogging

August 2017 marks 10 years of blogging. In that time we’ve written almost 2200 posts. We’ve had millions of visitors. My first blog post was a bit of a cliche. The first real content on the blog was a post about the 7th circuit court of appeals ruling in the E360 v. Spamhaus lawsuit. I continued following that case for the next 4 years as various arguments, filings, and rulings were...

Mandatory TLS is coming

Well, not exactly mandatory but Chrome will start labeling any text or email form field on a non-TLS page as “NOT SECURE”. Chrome 62 will be released as stable some time around October 24th. If you want to avoid the customer support overhead then, regardless of whether any of the information on a form is sensitive, you should probably make sure that all your forms are accessible via...

Maybe they're just not that into you?

In April of last year I created a new twitter account. I can’t remember exactly why, but it was a throwaway created to look at some aspect of how twitter interacts with new accounts. As part of the account creation process I gave Twitter an email address. They sent me a confirmation message right away: I didn’t click the button. Four months later they sent me another confirmation...

Local-part Semantics

An email address has two main parts. The local-part is the bit before the @-sign and the domain is the bit after it. Loosely, the domain part tells SMTP how to get an email to the destination mailserver while the local part tells that server whose mailbox to put it in. I’m just looking at the local part today, the “steve” in “steve@example.com”. Talkin’...

August mini-recess

Blogging will be light through the end of the month. We’re headed to Wyoming to see the eclipse this weekend. As well, with all of the current political events happening it’s hard to focus on email right now. So basically I’m giving myself permission to not blog daily through the end of August. I’ll blog as I have stuff to say. Some of those might be copies and pastes from...

Email address as identity

A few months ago I was talking about different mailbox tools and mentioned email addresses are the keys to our online identity. They are, email addresses are the magic key that authenticates us and opens access to different accounts. The bad guys know this too. The Justice department recently announced a plea deal related to compromised email accounts. The individual in question gained access to...

Reengagement emails

By default I don’t load images in email. For one thing it lets me see who is using open / click data to measure engagement. This morning I got a reengagement email from my Senator.  There are things I really like about this email and there are somethings I think they get a little wrong. The good This is a great subject line. I like the use of “ghosting” to describe what the...

State of Email Deliverability

I had other posts in the pipeline, but saw a link to the Litmus 2017 State of Email Deliverability Report and decided that deserved a mention here. There’s all sorts of interesting data there, and well worth a download and read. I was, of course, interested in the “most problematic subscriber acquisition sources.” Senders having blocking issues or blacklist problems in the past...

Not a customer you want

Earlier this week one of my ESP clients contacted me. They have a new (potential?) customer dealing with some delivery challenges. Client was looking for advice on how to move the customer over and improve their delivery at the same time. My advice was actually pretty simple: this isn’t a customer you want. Walk away. I reached that conclusion about 10 seconds after I loaded the...

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