More than just PGP Cryptography is the science of securing communication from adversaries. In the email world it’s most obvious use is tools like PGP or S/MIME that are used to encrypt a message so that it can only be read by the intended recipient, or to sign a message so that the recipient can be sure of who it came from. There are quite a few other aspects of sending email where a little...
A lot of marketers tell me “no sender confirms addresses” or “confirming addresses is too hard for the average subscriber.” I find both these arguments difficult to accept. Just today I subscribed to a mailing list that had a confirmation step. The subscription form was pretty simple. I entered my email address into a webform, hit submit and was taken to another page. Once...
Much like every other day, I got some spam today. Here’s a lightly edited copy of it. Let’s go through it and see what they did that makes it clear that it’s spam, which companies helped them out, and what you should avoid doing to avoid looking like these spammers… Received: from [213.144.59.132] (114.sub-75-210-142.myvzw.com [75.210.142.114] by m.wordtothewise.com...
One of the tenets of good delivery is know your recipients. Woot.com seems to know their recipients.
Happy Friday.
OMI responded to my post about data cleansing yesterday. She asked an interesting question: Why do so many in this industry feel that the email channel should be somehow held to a higher standard than other direct marketing channels? There are a lot of reasons why the email channel is held to a higher standard. The big one is actually that the consumers have a big enough stick (in the form of...
In an effort to get a blog post out yesterday before yet another doctor’s appointment I did not do nearly enough research on the company I mentioned selling list cleansing data. As Al correctly pointed out in the comments they are currently listed on the SBL. And when I actually did the research I should have done it was clear this company has a long term history of sending unsolicited...
According to Ken, Outward Media has productized a database of 300,000,000 email addresses that should never be mailed. OMI’s Clean-Send Suppression Database can help to protect your email sender reputation and save you valuable marketing dollars. In a nutshell, OMI Clean-Send is a database consisting of approximately 300 million negative email records (spam traps, foreign IP’s, hard bounces, and...
There’s a company that advertises a lot on TV. The ads are well done, they tell a clear story in the 30 seconds. They feature a pretty and happy young woman dancing around. There is a great catchy tune. From all appearances it’s a successful ad campaign. The point of the ad campaign is to drive traffic to a website where the domain owner can collect a lot of information and sell it on...
One thing I get in some of the comments here and in some of the discussions I have with email senders is that no commercial emailer ever sends unsolicited email. That, clearly, at some point the recipient opted in to receive mail and if that person doesn’t want mail they shouldn’t ever give out their email address. I have an old yahoo address that’s used primarily as my Flickr...
I’m hearing from lots of folks that they’re seeing some improvement in delivery to AOL accounts. As everyone can imagine, the AOL situation has been a common thread of discussion on many delivery lists. One person even commented at how fragile the AOL mail server seems. My own thoughts are a little different. The AOL mail system is notoriously complex and integrated. Many of the folks...
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