ArchiveJuly 2010

Optonline problems

I’m hearing from multiple sources that they’ve been having problems getting mail delivered to optonline.net, optonline.com and optimum.net all day. This appears to be affecting senders across the board, from ISPs to ESPs. It looks like something is not working right over there, and hammering retries doesn’t seem to be helping. The best recommendation is for senders to back off...

What you should do Right Now – Thursday Mini-Audit

… if your company runs any sort of email marketing, anyway. Right now is the best time to do a mini-audit of your mail campaign. It’ll just take ten minutes, and if you put off doing it until tomorrow it’ll probably never get done. Go to your public-facing company home page. Does it have a link to your privacy policy? Does it have a link to where you can sign up for mailing...

Delivery consulting: it's all about the credibility

A few months ago I found a great blog post written by an ER doctor about how to convince other doctors to come in and deal with a patient in the middle of the night. There are quite  few similarities between his advice and the advice I would give delivery experts, ISP relations folks and ESP representatives when dealing with ISPs and spam filtering companies. Credibility is the sole currency you...

I'm on a blocklist! HELP!

Recently, an abuse desk rep asked what to do when customers were complaining about being assigned an IP address located on a blocklist. Because not every blocklist actually affects mail delivery it’s helpful to identify if the listing is causing a problem before diving in and trying to resolve the issue. Find out whether mail is actually being blocked, or whether the customer just went to...

Tagged Email Addresses

Sept 17, 2019: Shutting down comments on this post because we cannot help you recover any email account and I am concerned about the number of people who are providing PII (including phone numbers, credit card numbers!!! and email addresses) in the comments.  A tagged email address is any email address that provides some additional information to the recipient when they receive email sent to that...

Appendleads is not unusual

I called out David Williams from appendleads.com yesterday for his spam. Sure he’s a spammer, his database is full of garbage information and his email violates CAN SPAM but he’s not that unusual in the realm of list sellers. He is very typical of the people I see offering lists for sale. List sellers are the internet version of used car salesmen. Everyone knows they are slimy sales...

Buying Lists

One of my email addresses at a client got spammed today offering to sell me appending services. I was going to post the email here and point out all of the problems in how he was advertising it, including violating CAN SPAM. As I often do, I plugged his phone number into google, only to discover that my blog post from March about this spammer was the 2nd hit for that number. Well, go me. I can...

Creating effective links

CampaignMonitor blogged today about an email they sent out that triggered the Thunderbird “this might be a scam” filter. After a bit of tweaking, we discovered that Thunderbird systematically throws up this alert when it sees a URLs in your HTML email copy. In this case, we had made the mistake of adding the following line: If you would like to support the National Wildlife Federation...

Email is not direct mail

Had an interesting talk with a colleague at a BBQ this weekend. He was at a large ISP and then moved on to do delivery at a large email marketing company. This marketing company was started by a very successful direct (snail mail) marketer. The CEO believed totally in testing and they measured everything. They knew what colors provoked a better response and which fonts were better received by...

10 ways spam is like Vuvuzelas

Amir Lev has a great post today detailing the 10 ways that spam is like Vuvuzelas. After reading his reasons (and deleting over 1000 messages from Cutwail), I absolutely agree. 10. It’s continuous and unavoidable The vuvuzela emits a loud, irritating, continuous noise that’s impossible to avoid — ruining many people’s World Cup experience. Spam is eyecatching, irritating...

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