ArchiveJuly 2012

Outlook.com

The big news in email today is Microsoft’s announcement of the next version of Hotmail: Outlook.com. This does appear to be an attempt to compete with a host of Google’s offerings. Not only does Outlook.com include Skype and access to social media accounts, but it also includes web app versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint with 7GB of storage space. I’m not sure how actively...

Bounces, complaints and metrics

In the email delivery space there are a lot of numbers we talk about including bounce rates, complaint rates, acceptance rates and inbox delivery rates. These are all good numbers to tell us about a particular campaign or mailing list. Usually these metrics all track together. Low bounce rates and low complaint rates correlate with high delivery rates and high inbox placement. But sometimes the...

More about the mail.ru FBL

Len Shneyder has a really interesting post up about the mail.ru feedback loop and the broader message this sends about the intersection of social media and email marketing. Go read it!

Letting people stop transactional mail

The question of putting unsub links on transactional messages came up on multiple lists recently. As with any question that has to do with email and controlling it, there were a lot of different opinions. A number of people believed that transactional mail should never, ever have an unsubscribe. Their argument was that transactional mail is too valuable to allow recipients to unsubscribe from it...

Leaving money on the table

On August 1 two domains in the Netherlands are going away: wanadoo.nl and orange.nl. Current users of these domains are being transitioned to new addresses at online.nl. Mailchimp has more information and links. This is a good time for all of us to consider how easy it is for a subscriber to change their address of record. Some senders just have the subscriber unsubscribe from one address and...

Reputation is more complex than a single number

I checked our SenderScore earlier this month, as quite a few people mentioned that they’d seen SenderScore changes – likely due to changed algorithms  and new data sources. It sure looks like something changed. Our SenderScore was, for a while, zero out of a hundred. That’s as bad as it’s possible to get. I didn’t get a screenshot of the zero score, but I grabbed...

Phishing and trust

Tom Sather has a great post up on the RP Email marketing blog discussing phishing. His point is that phishing lowers the overall trust in email marketing. He lists a number of things marketers should consider doing to counteract that loss of trust. I rely heavily on the use of tagged addresses to deal with phishing in my own mailbox. If an email doesn’t come to the right address, then...

J.D. Falk Award

This morning M³AAWG announced the creation of the J.D. Falk award to recognize and honor people like J.D. who work to make the Internet safer for all users. Nominees can be individuals or teams in an academic or company environment who have developed a service, created a specification or security mechanism, generated notable research, or produced other work reducing online abuse and improving the...

Nameless and faceless

Ken Magill wrote about Spamhaus last week. In the article he commented about the volunteers. By most accounts, the folks responsible for maintaining Spamhaus’s blacklists can be a very annoying group to deal with—mainly because they’re faceless and unforgiving. Today, Ken published a response from Steve Linford, the head of Spamhaus. The response is well worth a read and I encourage you to head...

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