March 2014: The month in email

What did we talk about here on the blog in March? It seems we talked a lot about Gmail but also looked at some CAN SPAM issues.
Gmail
When it comes to innovating in the inbox, Gmail is leaps and bounds ahead of the pack. They made some improvements to their image caching process and are now respecting cache headers, so marketers can update images and track multiple opens. They also started rolling out grid view in the promotions tab, giving marketers a way to show pictures to recipients rather than text subject lines. I wrote about their views on senders best practices as presented at M³AAWG 30 in San Francisco. Then there was ongoing news about their new FBL. Many ESPs started getting approval notices for joining their FBL and Sendgrid published an open letter about how the FBL has been helping them identify bad players on their network.
CAN SPAM
Oddly enough I wrote two different posts about CAN SPAM, which seems like a lot for as little as I managed to blog in March. One discussed if CAN SPAM applied to individual prospecting emails (yes, but really, violating that is like speeding most people aren’t going to get caught or punished) and the other looked at the rules surrounding harvesting.
Delivery
I talked about how domains need to be warmed up, not just IP addresses. And how there are lots of common causes for delivery problems, and too many people go for the edge cases without ruling out the normal cases first.
Odds and ends
The other posts don’t really lend themselves to easy classification. I talked delivery on Tech Talk. I amused myself by posting a link to horribly done spam and a bit of a snarky summary of the current state of ISP Relations. I linked to a blog post pointing out that social engineering is still alive and well in the hackers toolkit and another one looking at effective email marketing strategies.