ArchiveOctober 2007

Wired editor has enough spam!

Seth Godin links to a post up over on The Long Tail about spammers who send PR mail to Chris Anderson, an editor at wired. Apparently lots of people send automated email to the editor of Wired hawking their latest and greatest product, service or photos. In response to this overwhelming amount of mail, Chris has instituted a new email acceptance policy. He says So fair warning: I only want two...

New VP at Goodmail

Charles Stiles, who managed the postmaster team at AOL and was laid off 2 weeks ago, is the new VP of Worldwide Business Development at Goodmail.
Ken Magill mentioned the possibility of Charles moving to Goodmail yesterday.

Do open rates matter?

Ken Magill over at DirectMag has an article deriding the reliance on ‘open rates’ as a metric for the success (or failure!) of marketing campaigns. E-mail delivers a return on investment so high, it’s practically embarrassing. It doesn’t require getting fuzzy with the metrics. But as long as we continue to call the percentage of graphics displayed in a given campaign its “open rate,”...

DKIM "i=" vs "d=" and Reputation

This really should be part seven of a twelve part series or some such as it deals with an aspect of DKIM that’s really important, but is way down in the details of implementation. (dkim.org is a reasonable place to start for a general overview of DKIM). There’s an apparently endless thread on the DKIM-SSP spec development mailing list at the moment about the differences between two...

Experience as a recipient

One of the challenges of my job is to separate my personal feelings and experiences related to email marketing and spam from my advice to clients. I am here to make your delivery better, not to make everyone use email marketing the way that makes me the most comfortable. That being said, I get a lot of spam across my various email addresses. If I have an extra few minutes I’ll sometimes...

Changes at AOL Postmaster desk

The recent layoffs at AOL did affect the AOL Postmaster desk, and information I have received is that there was significant loss. As a result of the staff decrease, some changes have been made to the whitelisting and FBL processes. In order for a FBL to be approved it must meet the new FBL guidelines. In a nutshell, anyone wanting to get a FBL from AOL must meet ONE of the following criteria. The...

Do it yourself mail systems

Through my position here at Word to the Wise I’ve interacted with dozens of companies over the years. Some companies outsource the mechanics of email sending to email service providers, others buy a software or MTA solution from one of the many vendors out there. For both these groups delivery problems are usually issues with permission or user expectations. Technically there are few...

Slow Server

Sorry about the slowness, this server is the same one that is hosting thewholeinternet.wordtothewise.com and it got posted to digg today.
If the traffic storm keeps up for more than a day or two we’ll make other arrangements for the blog.

Consent does not mean confusing your recipients

Cam Beck on Marketing Prefs has a post today about presenting users with confusing choices in an opt-in process. Bank of America followed the letter of the law, but they did so with a method that can only be described as misleading since people typically don’t read those sorts of messages, and the action required to opt out changes from one email message to the next within the same form. I’ve...

What metrics are you measuring?

Marketers measure a lot of metrics about the email they send. But are they measuring the right metrics? Mark Brownlow talks about how marketers may not always know what their measuring. He also links to Email Insider where the Email Diva talks about what metrics can be measured. More importantly, she points out that asking questions and determining what you want out of your email marketing...

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