More fun with visualization

The Yahoo visualization tool has been a lot of fun to watch. You can see how mail changes, see how subject line changes and even see when commercial mailers do major blasts. One marketer described it to me as “Total marketing porn.” I even took a screen shot of someone doing a drop of their […]

Yahoo email visualization tool

This is pretty awesome. Visualize Yahoo! Mail Make sure you click on the “Trending Keywords” on the left hand side of the image.  

Engagement based delivery makes testing tricky

Yesterday I wrote about how important recipients are to achieving good delivery. The short version of yesterday’s post is that delivery is all about engagement, and how the ISPs were really focusing on engagement and proving custom user experiences. This is great, for the user. Take the common example where a commercial list has some […]

Recipients are the secret to good delivery

Many, many people hire me to educate them on delivery and fix their email problems. This is good, it’s what I do. And I’m quite good at helping clients see where their email program isn’t meeting expectations. I can translate tech speak into marketing. I can explain things in a way that shifts a client’s […]

New EU directives

The EU has published consumer protection directives. Members states have 2 years to implement and enforce these directives. The interesting bit is this: 3) Banning pre-ticked boxes on websites When shopping online – for instance buying a plane ticket – you may be offered additional options during the purchase process, such as travel insurance or […]

Hotmail fights greymail

I’ve heard a lot of marketers complaining about people like me who advocate actually purging addresses from marketing lists if those addresses are non-responsive over a long period of time. They have any number of reasons this advice is poor. Some of them can even demonstrate that they get significant revenue from mailing folks who […]

Government and botnets

The US government is looking at telling ISPs how to deal with compromised customers and botnets. They’re a bit late to the party, though. Most of the major commercial ISPs have been implementing significant botnet controls for many years now. Control involves a number of different techniques, but notification has been designed into the system […]

Spot the CAN SPAM violations

I received this piece of unsolicited email today, to an address harvested off a website. How many CAN SPAM violations can you count?

I’m counting at 4 violations, plus aggravated damages because the address was harvested. How many violations can you find? Would you trust this company to sell you actual opt-in addresses?

Spammers and Google+

I have a google+ account, but don’t check it very often. There seems to be a significant amount of noise on the feeds and trying to keep up with all the people who added me to circles was driving all the real mail out of my gmail inbox. This morning I realized the noise just […]

Changes at Hotmail

Microsoft announced a number of changes to the Hotmail interface today. It doesn’t look like this will affect how mail is received, but will affect how users can interact with it. As always, the best advice I can give you is send mail people want and like.