April 2015: The Month in Email

We started the month with some conversations about best practices, both generally looking at the sort of best practices people follow (or don’t) as well as some specific practices we wanted to look at in more depth. Three for this month:

  • Be gracious with opt-out requests. Email marketing is hard. Even when it’s successful, response rates can be very low. It is surely frustrating to hear from people who don’t want your email, but it can help you refine your marketing program.

  • Put bounce policies in place before your important email bounces. If you’re sending legitimate, requested, and wanted email (which of course you are, right?), it’s important to think about the implications of delivery failure not only on your business but on your customers’ lives.

  • Examine the real value of an old list. Just because you can buy addresses doesn’t mean you should. Here are some things to think about if you’re considering it.

We also noted that even with the very best practices, mistakes happen and trusted senders can recover from them.

At the intersection of best practices and industry news, we looked at the political realm and where politics, fraud, and spam overlap. We also talked about how important it is to make sure our politicians understand internet and email technologies.

In other industry news, Josh continued the exploration he started last month of Salesforce’s DKIM implementation and created a tutorial on how to use it. He also outlined the authentication changes Microsoft has made as part of their Office365/Exchange Online Protection over IPv6 implementation. Steve briefly clarified the different methods for email authentication and email repudiation, and I wrote a bit about email verification services.

I also mentioned that AOL hasn’t come up for me with clients lately, but several of our readers commented that they are still having active AOL-related discussions with their customers. I also wrote about the compromised employee account at Sendgrid, and the security implications for the email industry. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this sort of thing going forward.

Office365/EOP and Outlook.com/Hotmail will converge
Lyris to be acquired by Aurea

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October 2014 – The Month in Email

October was action-packed at WttW. We wrapped up some big and interesting client projects (look for some case studies soon!), attended another great M³AAWG conference, and made an exciting announcement that we’re hiring a deliverability specialist. The combination of these frees up some more of my time for blogging, which I’ve really missed. Look for more from me in November and December.

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June 2014: The month in email

Each month, we like to focus on a core email feature or function and present an overview for people looking to learn more. This month, we addressed authentication with SPF.
We also talked about feedback mechanisms, and the importance for senders to participate in FBL processes.
In our ongoing discussions about spam filters, we took a look at the state of our own inboxes and lamented the challenge spam we get from Spamarrest. We also pointed out a post from Cloudmark where they reiterate much of what we’ve been saying about filters: there’s no secret sauce, just a continuing series of efforts to make sure recipients get only the mail they want and expect to receive. We also looked at a grey area in the realm of wanted and expected mail: role accounts (such as “marketing@companyname.com”) and how ESPs handle them.
As always, getting into the Gmail inbox is a big priority for our clients and other senders. We talked a bit about this here, and a bit more about the ever-changing world of filters here.
On the subject of list management, we wrote about the state of affiliate mailers and the heightened delivery challenges they face getting in the inbox. We got our usual quota of spam, and a call from a marketer who had purchased our names on a list. You can imagine how effective that was for them.
And in a not-at-all-surprising development, spammers have started to employ DMARC workarounds. We highlighted some of the Yahoo-specific issues in a post that raises more questions.
We also saw some things we quite liked in June. In the Best Practices Hall of Fame, we gave props to this privacy policy change notification and to our bank’s ATM receipts.
We also reviewed some interesting new and updated technology in the commercial MTA space, and were happy to share those findings.

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March 2015: The month in email

Happy March! We started the month with some more movement around CASL enforcement from our spam-fighting friends to the north. We noted a $1.1 million fine levied against Compu-Finder for CASL violations, as well as a $48,000 fine to Plentyoffish Media for failing to provide unsubscribe links. We noted a few interesting things: the fines are not being imposed at the maximum limits, violations are not just on B2C marketing, but also on B2B senders, and finally, that it really just makes sense — both from a delivery perspective and a financial perspective — to comply with the very reasonable best practices outlined in CASL.

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