The return of the Magill Report

After a 6 month hiatus, Ken Magill has returned to offer his insightful, and somewhat snarky, take on email marketing. You can subscribe at The Magill Report.
Ken is really trying to make this report an example of how to do ad supported email newsletters right. When I subscribed yesterday I received the following welcome message:

Please click here to confirm your subscription to The Magill Report.
What You Can Expect
As part of your subscription, you will receive The Magill Report weekly newsletter each Tuesday and possibly one stand-alone ad or survey on Thursdays.
You will receive no more than two e-mails per week from The Magill Report.
And, no, you can’t opt out of the Thursday e-mails and still get The Magill Report. Those Thursday ads are what will be keeping Magill in vodka martinis and cigars.
What You’ll Get in The Magill Report

  • Fearless reporting on Internet marketing available nowhere else
  • Rare insights from someone with real-world direct-marketing experience
  • Regular reports on studies and surveys relevant to your business
  • Intelligent, brash and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny analysis
  • The real stories behind the PR nonsense regurgitated elsewhere
  • Occasionally, even some juicy gossip (Magill loves gossip)
  • Authoritative, insightful, how-to and reference information related to getting things done
  • The ability to comment and submit content for potential publication
  • Occasional references to Magill’s unhealthy relationship with alcohol.

He hit all the high points you should in a welcome message. He told me how frequently I’d hear from him and when, he also included information about future content.

Ken has been reporting on the email marketing industry since very early on and always has an interesting perspective on what’s happening. Go sign up!

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Link roundup June 18, 2010

Hotmail has released a new version of their software with some changes. Return Path discusses the changes in depth, but there are a couple that senders may find helpful.

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How not to build a mailing list

I mentioned yesterday one of the major political blogs launched their mailing list yesterday. I pointed out a number of things they did that may cause problems. Today, I discovered another problem.
This particular blog has been around for a long time, probably close to 10 years. It allows anyone to join and create their own blogs and comment with registered users. As part of their new mailing list, they added everyone who has ever registered to their mailing list. They did not send a “we have a new list, want to join it?” email, they added every registered user to the list and said “you can opt out if you want.”
This is such a bad idea. My own account was used once, to make one comment, back in 2005. Yes, 2005. It’s been almost 5 years since I last logged into the site. Sure, I have email addresses that go back that far, but not everyone does. That list is going to be full of problems: dead addresses, spamtraps, duplicates, unengaged and uninterested.
Seriously, they’re adding people who’ve not logged into their site in 5 years to a mailing list. How can this NOT go horribly wrong?
My initial thought was this was going to blow up in a week. I’m now guessing they’ll start seeing delivery problems a lot sooner than that.

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Delivery resources

I’m working on a few projects designed to help provide mentoring for other delivery people and to bridge the communication gap between the various groups active in email. One of those projects is collecting, linking to, and publishing more delivery resources. Some will be linked to directly from the blog, others will be linked to from the wiki. While I’m reasonably familiar with what’s out there, it is impossible for me to know about all the useful resources available. So I ask you readers:

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