I occasionally consult for activists using email. Their needs and requirements are a little different from email marketers. Sure, the requirements for email delivery are the same: relevant and engaging mail to people who requested it. But there are complicating issues that most marketers don’t necessarily have to deal with. Activist groups are attractive targets for forged signups. Think...
David Spinks asks on twitter: Should you ever contact someone who made an abuse complaint about your newsletter to find out why My answer was: It depends, but it’s too complicated to explain in 140 characters. I don’t suggest responding to people who hit the “this is spam” button as a way of complaining. FBLs are complaints, but they are people who don’t necessarily...
Four weeks ago you signed up for your mailing list using a virgin email address. (You didn’t? Maybe you should do that today – there’s no time like Thursday for a quick sanity check!) Check the mailbox for the account you signed up Is the mail you signed up for in the inbox? If you’re mailing at least weekly then there should be at least three messages there. Do they have...
I’ve been working through some Hotmail issues with a client over the last few months. One of the things that has become clear to me is how little Hotmail actually does with SPF records. In fact, Hotmail completely ignored my client’s SPF record and continued to deliver email into the inbox. This isn’t just a sender that had a “well, we think most of our email will come...
Mike Monteiro has a screenshot of what happens when you actually fill up a gmail inbox.
How much of that mail is spam, I wonder?
HT: Laughing Squid
I was cleaning out my spam folder this afternoon. I try and do it at least once a day, otherwise the volume gets so bad I don’t actually look at the mail I just mark it all as read. I realized, though, that spamfilters are actually a marketer’s best friend. If there were no spam filters keeping all the crap people get out of their inbox (in my case over 1000 messages a day) then spam...
I really love my job, but sometimes I miss academia, research and science. One of the ways I stay somewhat connected to that world is reading Scienceblogs (and the new Scientopia site). A few weeks ago my worlds collided when one of the librarians at Scienceblogs posted a Friday funny: 5 signs you’re talking to a social media douchebag. Nobody Knows What They Actually Do. When you try to...
Mark Brownlow has a great roundup of how statistics and data can mislead marketers if they’re not really paying attention.
There are a number of different things delivery experts can do help senders improve their own delivery. Yes, I said it: senders are responsible for their delivery. ESPs, delivery consultants and deliverability experts can’t fix delivery for senders, they can only advise. In my own work with clients, I usually start with making sure all the technical issues are correct. As almost all spam...
Columnist Mike Cassidy of the SJ Mercury News dedicates his column today to explaining how horribly a spammer named Michael Luckman is being treated by Spamhaus. The gist of the story is that Mr. Luckman thinks that because it is legal to purchase lists and send mail that there is nothing anyone can do to stop him from doing so. Unfortunately for Mr. Luckman, this isn’t actually true...
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