News and links 12/31/09

We’re iced in here in DC so I’ve been catching up with some industry news while camped in front of a heater and the TV.
Best of the ESPs by Forrester Research. Congrats to ET and Responsys for coming out on top. The results, as reported by MediaPost, match reasonably well with my overall impressions of the industry (so they must be right!)
Return Path is rolling out a new version of SenderScore. A welcome change for those of us who regularly refer to an IP’s sender score and find it doesn’t match other data.
CAUCE has done a series of posts looking back at significant events in spam over the last decade.
Al has a retrospective on various data breaches affecting email addresses over the last few years.
Happy New Year, everyone!

Holiday Break
SpamAssassin Problems

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Links for 9/29/09

A little bit of link sharing today.
Mark Brownlow posts about how critical clicks are to conversion. He also looks at successful techniques that various marketers have used to engage customers.
Chris Wheeler has an insightful post at SpamResource discussing reputation, engagement and what the ISPs are looking at when making delivery decisions. J.D. Falk touches on some of the same themes in his blog post “The Spam Folder is Your Chance to Shine.”
Neil Schwartzman talks about delivery emergencies from the ISP side of the desk.
Terry Zink gives a brief background on sender reputation and a followup looking at how ISPs are working to prevent spammers from stealing their reputations.
Seth Godin continues to turn marketing on his head with his discussion of how marketers have gone from renting to owning.

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Links for Sept 10, 2009

As everyone else has been announcing, the Tucows FBL is taking applications from the general public. I’ve updated the ISP Information page to link to the signup as well.
Loren McDonald has a blog up at MediaPost talking about how the language marketers use (Blast!) affects how they are perceived in the industry. I think he’s quite correct. Many people on the senders side hear thing things marketers say and judge that the markters are contemptuous of not only the ISPs but also the recipients. Language matters!
Pivotal Veracity announced MailboxIQ this week. This technology allows senders to track what individual users do to their email. Senders are now able to measure inbox / bulk performance for their whole list, not just seed addresses. The delivery person in me thinks this will help senders make better decisions about engaged recipients and give them more data to send mail that recipients want. The rest of me is a bit unhappy with marketers finding a new way to invade people’s privacy. I’m just glad that I don’t use webmail except for handling client issues.
In other news, Mailchimp has been trolling through their client’s response data and discovered that recipients using gmail.com are more engaged and responsive than users at other domains.

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A series of warnings

Over the last month there have been a number of people sounding warnings about coming changes that ESPs are going to have to deal with. There has been mixed reaction from various people, many people who hear these predictions start arguing with the speaker. Some argue that our predictions are wrong, others argue that if our predictions are right then the senders will just start acting more like spammers.
I have put together a collection of links from recent blog posts looking towards the future and how things may be changing.

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