ArchiveNovember 2010

Email attacks

Ken has an article up today about the ongoing attacks against ESPs and email marketers. In it he says: Someone in permission-based email marketing should have sounded the alarm about the wedding-photo attacks months before Blumberg did. The attacks were being talked about on at least 2 different private lists. One made up primarily of email marketers and most of them didn’t seem to take it...

Happy Thanksgiving

I’m still catching up from being out last week, so no blog post today. I do, however, have tart to share. Mostly. Sorta. We ate it all.

ESPs being targeted

There has been an ongoing, concerted attack against ESPs recently. Today ReturnPath published some of what is known about the attack. This is an organized, deliberate, and destructive attack clearly intent on gaining access to industry-grade email deployment systems. Further, the potential consequences should ESP client mailing lists be compromised at this time of the year is unimaginable. If you...

Facebook Postmaster page

There’s still quite a bit of concern and worry about how the Facebook messaging platform is going to affect marketing. One thing that may help is the Facebook postmaster page. There’s all sorts of good information on those pages, reflecting the years of experience that their messaging team has in running large platforms. Some points worth mentioning. Facebook is giving detailed...

TWSD: SEO Spamming

It’s no secret that I get a lot of spam. It’s no secret that some catches my eye enough to actually write about it here. Today’s spam is an email that actually made me laugh, though. Somewhere, some gardening site paid a lot of money for search engine optimization and got ripped off. We own the site samspade.org. It’s down now, victim of a major hardware crash, but this...

Another take on the emailpocalypse

One of the strengths of email that instant messaging lacks is asynchronous communication.  With email, you send someone a message and they may or may not respond right away.  Sending somebody an email means that you are not necessarily expecting an instantaneous reply.  In fact, that’s the whole point of not using the phone or instant messaging.  You are not expecting your target recipient to be...

Attention is a limited resource

Marketing is all about grabbing attention. You can’t run a successful marketing program without first grabbing attention. But attention is a limited resource. There are only so many things a person can remember, focus on or interact with at any one time. In many marketing channels there is an outside limit on the amount of attention a marketer can grab. There are only so many minutes...

Relevance or Permission

One of the discussions that surrounds email marketing is whether relevance trumps permission or permission trumps relevance. I believe this entire discussion is built on a false dichotomy. Sending relevant email is important. Not only do recipients expect mail to be relevant, but the ISPs often make delivery decisions on how relevant their users find your mail. Marketers that send too much...

FBox: The sky isn't falling

Having listened to the Facebook announcement this morning, I am even more convinced that emailpocalypse isn’t happening. Look, despite the fact that companies like Blue Sky Factory think that this means marketers are NEVER EVER going see the inside of an inbox again this isn’t the end of email marketing. Yes, Facebook email is a messaging platform that marketers are not going to have...

Going to MAAWG

Following on from last weeks post about MAAWG, I thought I’d write a bit about actually going to MAAWG. You’re an ESP and you’ve been accepted into the organization. Now you have some decisions to make. Who should go to MAAWG from your company? Send at least one person from your compliance or abuse desk. At the very, very least send someone who sets your policies. Don’t...

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