November 2014 – the month in email

Over the years, we get many of the same questions again and again. This isn’t a complaint; it’s a useful opportunity for us to check in and see if the technologies, policies and best practices have evolved over time, or if our previous recommendations still stand. One example this month of something that has changed (the situation has improved a bit): Using URL shorteners and one that has not: The Best Time to Send Email.

In industry news, we noted the impact of deliverability challenges on the bottom line as Zulily reported a drop in earnings and attributed some of this to mail problems. In other attributions and misattributions, Steve looked at a claim of ISP tampering and concluded it was simply user error.

We also looked at a few interesting attempts to evolve email clients, and a new cloud platform from Message Systems.

We also started soliciting holiday email predictions (add yours!), and then we took some time off to enjoy Thanksgiving and sort through hundreds of resumes for our new deliverability specialist role (it’s been really wonderful to see how many smart and talented people are out there geeking out on all things email-related!) We’re hoping to have our expanded team in place as we move into 2015, so look for the pace of blogging to pick up a bit in just a few weeks!

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August 2014: The Month in Email

Isn’t August the month where things are supposed to slow down? We’re still waiting for that to happen around here… it’s been great to be busy, but we’re hoping to continue to carve out more time for blogging as we move into the fall.
August
As usual, we reported on a mix of industry trends and news, the persistence of spam, and did a deep dive into an interesting technical topic. Let’s start there: Steve wrote a post explaining Asynchronous Bounces (yes, it’s a GNFAB), with some examples of how they’re used and how they can cause operational problems.
In industry news, we did a roundup post of some Gmail changes and a followup post on security issues with non-Latin characters in addresses. We also celebrated the long-awaited release of a wonderful resource from MAAWG that I am very proud to have helped author, the white paper Help! I’m on a Blocklist! (PDF link). We receive dozens of these calls every week, and though we are always happy to help people solve urgent delivery crises, we spend most of our consulting time and attention working with people to build sustainable email programs, so this document is a great “self-service” resource for people looking to troubleshoot blocklist issues on their own.
In other industry and MAAWG-related news, we noted that the nomination period for the J.D. Falk award has opened (you have just a few more days, procrastinators) and took a moment to reminisce about our friend J.D. and his incredible contributions to the field.
On the topic of creating, sending, and reading more attractive email, we posted some  resources from Mailchimp and crowdsourcing templates from Send With Us. We also incorrectly reported on a not-actually-new interface from AOL, Alto. Interesting to note that there’s been so little followup from AOL (and almost no post-launch coverage) in the two years since launch.
We also touched on a few myths: email saves trees and low complaint volume is good.
And finally, in November of 2013, I unsubscribed from every possible email I received on a specific account. I followed up on that briefly in a Part 2 post, and this month went back and wrote a Part 3 followup. Spoiler alert: spam is still a problem. Of course, we got some comments that we were probably doing it wrong, so Unsubscribe Barbie showed up to add her thoughts. We try not to be snarky around here, but sometimes we just don’t try very hard.

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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.
 

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This month in email: October 2013

What did we talk about in October? Let’s take a look back over this month.

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