December 2014: The month in email

2014 has been a busy and exciting year at Word to the Wise (look for more on that in a year-end wrap-up post next week!) and this month was particularly thrilling for us as we officially doubled our size with the addition of Josh and Meri on our client services team.
If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you’ve probably spotted Josh’s byline on a few posts: Google’s Inbox Team answers questions on Reddit, which looks at what this new email client portends for both consumers and email marketers, and M3AAWG Recommends TLS, which reviews M3AAWG’s recommendation that mailbox providers phase out SSL encryption in favor of TLS. Look for more smart insights from Josh in 2015.
Steve contributed a post on the proper syntax for displaying a friendly email address, and a very helpful guide for generating useful test data that doesn’t compromise personally identifiable information from your actual customer data. He also detailed the brief DBL false positive from Spamhaus’ new “Abused-Legit” sub-zone and best practices for handling unrecognized responses.
I wrote about some of the subtleties inherent in how brands decide to “converse” with customers in email and other channels. We’ll just keep saying it: companies need to respect the inbox as personal space. I want to thank both Steve and Josh for picking up my slack on blogging. 7+ years is a long time to try and say new things on the blog and I needed a bit of a break.