According to Adage and Return Path, Donald Trump’s mail campaign is not one to write home about. He’s not asking for donations and has a high rate of spam complaints.
Ask Laura: Why is my video email blocked?
Dear Laura, We have a real estate client who has asked us to include short video previews of houses in their weekly newsletters to prospective buyers. The videos are great — informative, well-produced, and they definitely meet your definition of wanted email, as subscribers have been asking for this content for a long time. Unfortunately, we are learning that many email service providers...
Gmail / Apps authentication issues
I’ve seen several reports of unexpected rejections for unauthenticated email to Google over IPv6 today. Unauthenticated mail over IPv6 is a bad idea, but Google usually spam folders it rather than rejecting it. The Gmail status dashboard is reporting an issue “Some messages sent to consumer Gmail accounts are being rejected due to authentication enforcement” so something...
Permission: Let’s Talk Facts
I’ve commented in the past about how I can usually tell when an ISP makes filtering changes because all my calls relate to that ISP. The more recent contender is Gmail. They made changes a few months ago and a lot of folks are struggling to reach the inbox now. What I’m seeing, working with clients, is that there are two critical pieces to getting to the gmail inbox: permission and...
Who owns the inbox
One of the questions asked of my panel during Connections 16 last month was who owns the inbox. My point of view is that the end user owns the inbox, with a few minor exceptions. For instance, in the case of a business, the business owns the inbox. With email marketing, the marketing is entering a personal space as an invited guest. Senders need to be cognizant of this to continue having access...
Looking forward in email
Len Shneyder writes about what we can expect to see in the near future email landscape.
Creating emails
Email is, still, primarily a written medium. This means that good copywriting is crucial. Today I opened up an email and the pre-header says: Laura, should have get your Naturals Sample Bag.*Web Version Wait. What? Maybe they mean “should have got”? But that’s implying they’re sending out free sample bags to everyone. That can’t be right. But I can’t tell...
May 2016: The Month in Email
Summer, already? Happy June! Here’s a look at our busy month of May. I had a wonderful time in Atlanta at the Salesforce Connections 2016 conference, where I spoke on a panel about deliverability. While in Atlanta, I also visited our friends at Mailchimp, and later spoke at the Email Innovations conference in Las Vegas, where I did my best to avoid “explaining all the things”. Since my speaking...
FCC notice of proposed rulemaking
The FCC recently published a notice of proposed rulemaking that will have an impact on how we fight abuse on the internet. M3AAWG has submitted a comment on the proposal (pdf link). All submissions can be found on the FCC website.
Memories of Spam in May
This morning on Facebook a friend posted a picture saying that 15 years ago was the very first anti-spam conference (Spamcon*). All we have are some blurry scans of pictures and coffee mugs. . That 550 sign belonged to the bar where the night out was held. It got bought by K & P and lived in their garden until it rotted away a few years ago. So many folks who are still active in the space...