After a little more than two years and 500 posts we thought it was time for a redesign of the Word to the Wise blog. While we were cleaning up the design we also fixed some functionality that was broken and added some new features: Everything should render cleanly in most any browser Search works! The archives, over on the right hand side, are a lot easier to navigate If you visit the blog from...
Over at the Exacttarget blog, there is a guest post up from Annalivia who handles much of the sender support (and about 15 million other things) at AOL. On the nights before Christmas… when the relays are groaning under the loads and ISP admins start to turn into toads they tear out their hair and cry in despair “why’s all this mail coming out of thin air?” Head over to...
On Nov 20, Cox added a number of domains to the FCC Wireless domain list. One of the domains added was cox.net. This caused understandable consternation among a number of senders, as the opt-in requirements for wireless domains are much more stringent than for sending to non-wireless domains. Earlier today, Tom Bartel, from Return Path tweeted: “We pinged them – likely error -they are...
I was talking with one of my Barry pals recently and was treated to a rant regarding deliverability experts that can’t manage simple things. We’ve been having an ongoing conversation recently about the utterly stupid and annoying questions some senders ask. Last week, I was ranting about a delivery person asking what “5.7.1. Too many receipts this session” meant. This...
Mark Brownlow took my post about best practices and expanded on the theme. He is absolutely right and I encourage everyone to go read his article. The takeaway here is not to rush out and start ignoring best practices. Without the background understanding, that way lies email marketing hell. But if you can gain (or hire) a more nuanced understanding of issues, you might be able to break selected...
Here at Word to the Wise we have some unique requirements for mail. For instance, I need to be able to receive examples of emails that are being blocked elsewhere in order to do my job. This means not only do we not outsource mail to someone else, we also run limited spam filtering on the server side. It does mean I have to wade through a bit more spam than others do, but that’s generally...
How much control over delivery do senders have? I have repeatedly said that senders control their delivery. This is mostly true. Senders control their side of the delivery chain, but there is a point where the recipient takes over and controls things. As a recipient I can report your email as spam forward your email to another account on another mail system file your email in a mailbox I never...
In part 1 I talked about internationalised domain names, and how they were mapped onto ASCII strings. For sending email there are four bits of the message where internationalisation might need to be considered. Sender or recipient email address Header content, such as the Subject line or the “friendly” name in the To or From The visible body of the message The web URLs the body of the...
Last week @justinpremick tweeted the question “Is it ever OK to break best practices.” My reaction, and reply, was of course it is OK to break best practices, if you know what you’re doing and why. Best practices are all about things that are safe. If you do these things, in all likelihood you will not encounter any major problems. The things we tell people are best practices...
One of my major pet peeves is supposedly legitimate companies hiding behind privacy protection in their whois records. There is absolutely no reason for a legitimate company to do this. There are lots of reasons a non-legitimate company might want to hide behind privacy services, but I have never heard a good reason for legitimate companies to hide. Look, a company sending any commercial email is...
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