ArchiveApril 2009

How Spamfilters Work

AllSpammedUp has a post describing the primary techniques anti-spam filters use to identify mail as spam or not spam. While is this not sender or delivery focused knowledge, it is important for people sending mail to have a basic understanding of filtering mechanisms. Without that base knowledge, it’s difficult to troubleshoot problems and resolve issues. Any anti-spam system that is worth...

Confirmed opt-in

I spent the morning in multiple venues correcting mis-understandings of confirmed opt-in. The misunderstandings weren’t so much that people didn’t understand how COI works, but more they didn’t understand all the implications. In one venue, the conversation centered around how small a portion of deliverability the initial subscription process affects. Sure, sending unwanted...

Delivery news April 2009

Penton Media’s Marketing Practices Ken Magill responds to critics of Penton’s email marketing practices in an article out today. His article is quite open and points out that some of the things Penton does are not good. A couple answers weren’t pretty. For one thing, I found out we don’t have a permission box asking people if they want to receive third party ads. We simply start...

Poor delivery is not always about spam

There are days I think we have trained people too well to believe every delivery problem is a misplaced spam block. We also have people trained to expect near 100% immediate delivery from send to inbox. The problem is, email isn’t 100% reliable. It’s close. Very close. But sometimes mail just fails. It’s not because the ISPs hate you. It’s sometimes not even because the...

What Mark Said

Mark Brownlow skewers the arguments from opt-out proponents. A definite must read.

Reputation as measured by the ISPs

Part 3 in an ongoing series on campaign stats and measurements. In this installment, I will look a little closer at what other people are measuring about your email and how that affects your reputation at the ISPs. Part 1: Campaign Stats and Measurements Part 2: Measuring Open Rate Reputation at the ISPs is an overall measure of how responsive recipients are to your email. ISPs also look at how...

TWSD: Lying and Hiding

Another installment in my ongoing series: That’s What Spammers Do. In today’s installment we take a look at a company deceiving recipients and hiding their real identity. One of my disposable addresses has been getting heavily spammed from mylife.com. The subject lines are not just deceptive, they are provably lies. The mail is coming from random domains like urlprotect.com or...

Buying lists and other stupid marketing tricks

Back in November, I commented on Zoominfo and that they were selling senders very bad lists. At that time, Zoominfo did not have my current information. They have since rectified that problem and are now selling my information to people. This morning, I received an email that said: I wanted to follow up on a previous email I sent out a couple days ago.  At Company, we offer an affordable...

Subscribers notice what marketers do

Stephanie Miller from RP blogs at EEC about a UK consumer survey with the take home message: “consumers notice what email marketers do. When we send something interesting and relevant at a good pace, they are happy to stay active with our programs. When we don’t… well, then we’ve lost them, perhaps for good.”

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