ArchiveSeptember 2010

Suing spammers

I’m off to MAAWG next week and seem to have had barely enough time to breathe lately, much less blog. I have a half written post, but it’s taking a little more research to put together. That can wait until I get the chance to do the research. Instead I thought I’d talk about the North Coast Journal article “The Rise and Fall of a Spam Crusader.” It’s quite an...

Blasting the message!

Sending frequency is an important part of any email campaign. Too little mail and recipients forget about the mail and don’t open it when it does arrive. Too much mail and folks start complaining, like John Cole over at Balloon Juice. Take the dogs to the park for a half hour, come back, and there are 30 new messages from advocacy groups and campaigns in my email box. […] Seriously...

Know your target audience…

… and the device they’re probably going to read your email on.
@lauter from MailChimp points and laughs at an advertising email from Blackberry-the-company that’s completely unreadable when read on Blackberry-the-device.

That’s really bad marketing on a bunch of different levels.

Beware the TINS Army

When consulting with clients, I spend a lot of time trying to help them better understand the concept of sender reputation. Spam reports, feedback loops, and other data that comes from a collection of positive and negative reputational feedback about a company sending email. Certainly, the “This is not spam” action – moving an email from the spam folder to the inbox, or clicking...

Spam isn't a best practice

I’m hearing a lot of claims about best practices recently and I’m wondering what people really mean by the term. All too often people tell me that they comply with “all best practices” followed by a list of things they do that are clearly not best practices. Some of those folks are clients or sales prospects but some of them are actually industry colleagues that have...

Does your signup pass muster?

On Eric Goldman’s blog, Venkat discusses a recent fifth circuit decision about an online signup process and what the court will look at when considering a claim that a user didn’t read an online disclaimer.

Zombie Apocalypse

I hope my series on zombie addresses has convinced you that there are zombie addresses on your list and that you should be concerned about the effect they have on delivery and metrics. Today I’d like to talk about what you can do to get rid of zombie addresses without affecting too many actual subscribers. One thing that many companies struggle with while dealing with zombie addresses is...

Zombie email: Part 3

Last week, in Zombie email: part 1 and part 2 I talked a little about the history of email addresses and how changes in the ISP industry in the early to mid 2000’s brought about the rise of zombie email addresses. Today we’ll look at the effect zombie addresses have on email stats and why ISPs are starting to monitor zombie addresses. A zombie address, despite the fervent belief of...

Zombie email: Part 2

In zombie email: part 1 I talked about how email addresses were tightly tied to internet access in the very early years of the internet. We didn’t have to worry about zombie email addresses because when an account was shut down, or ignored for a long time then mail would start bouncing and a sender could stop sending to that account. There were two major changes to email accounts in the...

Zombie email: Part 1

Zombie email addresses: those email addresses that never really die, eat your brains and destroy your email delivery. To understand zombie addresses and why they’re just now becoming a problem, we really need to understand some of the history of email addresses. In the early days of the net, people got an email address usually associated directly with their access to the Internet. Many of...

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