ArchiveJanuary 2011

Conversational foreplay

How do you approach the first contact with a potential customer or prospect? Do you just jump right in and start making your pitch or do you actually take the time to introduce yourself and your company? Most good sales reps spend a little time socializing with prospects before they launch into the sales process, particularly when they are cold calling the target. This courtesy doesn’t seem...

Still more spam stats

Mailchannels put together another post looking at spam volumes. Related to that, many people are reporting that bot levels are climbing again.

Changes at Yahoo

Deliverability.com has a blog post from Naeem Kayani at Adknowledge about the recent Yahoo changes. They point to the reputation of the From: address as a factor. I’m not sure anyone knows what exactly Yahoo is doing, but the suggestions from Naeem are good ones.

Some thoughts on permission

A lot of email marketing best practices center around getting permission to send email to recipients. A lot of anti-spammers argue that the issue is consent not content. Both groups seem to agree that permission is important, but more often than not they disagree about what constitutes permission. For some the only acceptable permission is round trip confirmation, also known as confirmed opt-in...

Amendment is futile.

Late last month, Yahoo filed a motion to dismiss in the Holomaxx v. Yahoo case. There’s nothing that unexpected in the filing. The lawyers set the tone of the entire document with their very first paragraph. This is a lawsuit by a frustrated spammer to attempt to force Defendant Yahoo! Inc. (“Yahoo!”) to deliver millions of Plaintiff’s mass marketing emails each day to Yahoo! customers—...

Is your mail being bulk foldered?

Daisy at Signup.to posted a list of 11 things to do when mail is going to the bulk folder. Her suggestions are a good start to troubleshooting and fixing persistent bulk foldering of mail. One thing she doesn’t mention is that while bulk foldering can sometimes be the result of poor content, more often it’s the result of unengaged recipients. Think of bulk foldering this way: the ISP...

Social networks and bulk email

There’s been a bit of a commotion on Twitter and over at J Caldwell’s blog about Al’s reaction to someone harvesting his address off LinkedIn and then adding that email address to his company’s marketing / newsletter database. Al objected to getting the mail, the person who did this shot back that it wasn’t spam, there was lots of arguing both over twitter and on the...

More spam graphs

Ken Simpson, CEO of Mailchannels, was kind enough to give me permission to post their graph of spam and email volumes from September 1, 2010 through Jan 3, 2011. This chart also shows the trend of declining volumes of spam. There are some differences, though, which I think highlight how you get different pictures when looking at different data sources. For instance, the amount of real mail (blue...

Spam volumes in 2010

I started hearing various people comment about lower spam volumes sometime in mid December. This isn’t that unusual, spam volumes are highly variable and someone is always noticing that their spam load is going up or going down. The problem is extrapolating larger trends from a small selection of email addresses. There’s too much variation between email addresses and even domains to...

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