Blogging will probably be light next week. Steve and I are both headed to MAAWG SF. Steve will be presenting training on Monday and at one of the later sessions, too. I managed to get out of having to work this conference, so no presenting for me.
We’re both looking forward to seeing everyone. Drop by and say hi.
Google Buzz has garnered a lot of attention this week, most of it looking at the privacy implications of requiring users to opt-out of sharing information with anyone who’s ever sent them email. WARNING: Google Buzz Has a Huge Privacy Flaw Fugitivus Blog (possibly NSFW due to language) A dangerous buzz and opt-in isn’t just for email How Google Buzz just blew your psuedonym Lifehacker...
I signed up a disposable address at tagged.com last summer, to see how their signup process went and how aggressive they were at marketing. They mailed me maybe a dozen times over the course of a month and then the mail stopped. Until today. Today I got two messages from tagged.com, one from Sophia C (33) and one from Melinda E (27). The messages are identical except for the names and some of the...
Stephanie at Return Path has a great blog post on permission and how permission is an ongoing process not a one time thing. There were a couple statements that really grabbed my attention.
What really matters is not that permission was granted, but that it is earned, every time a message is sent […]
Permission requires a strong value proposition.
I’ve been seeing more and more social network spam recently, mostly on twitter. In some ways it’s even more annoying than email spam. Here I am, happily having a conversation with a friend and then some spammer sticks their nose in and tweets “myproduct will solve your problem!” It’s happened twice in the last week. In most recent example, I was asking my twitter...
AOL is currently returning “451 4.3.0 <invaliduser@aol.com>: Temporary lookup failure” in some cases when they really mean “550 user unknown.” This message from AOL should be treated as 5xx failure and the message should not be retried (if at all possible) and the failure should be counted as a hard bounce for list management purposes. This is something broken at...
I’ve seen multiple reports of Tagged.com and their interactions on various sides of the courtroom aisle. On the good side, Tagged.com won a judgment against a spammer sending spam to Tagged.com users. (Tagged has a post on their blog about the win, but the direct link to that article doesn’t work). On the minus side, yet another ruling against tagged.com. They’ve been accused of...
Mickey has a good summary of what’s going on in Maine where the courts forced the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to sell the email addresses of license purchasers to a commercial company. There isn’t permission associated with this and the commercial company has no pretense that the recipients want to receive mail from them. This is a bad idea and a bad way to get email...
A week ago, Goodmail notified customers about upcoming changes to the Goodmail Certification program. They wanted customers to be aware that Yahoo was going to stop offering Goodmail certified email priority delivery and guaranteed inbox placement as of February first. I’ve talked with a number of people in the industry, including representatives of Goodmail and Yahoo about this change...
There’s been an interesting discussion in the comments from yesterday’s post about temp failing. My position is that email is not a 100% reliable medium for transmitting time sensitive information. Two things happened today to reinforce that. Yahoo announced they were having incoming MTA issues again, causing them to non-specifically defer mail. This has been going on for almost a...
RSS - Posts