ArchiveAugust 2016

August 15, 2016

Subscription bombing, ESPs and Spamhaus

By laura

8 Min read

23 comments

15August

A number of ESPs woke up to a more-than-usually-bad Monday morning. Last night Spamhaus listed 10s of networks, including ESPs, on the SBL. The listings all contained the following note: Problem description ============================ The newsletter service () is using the referenced IP address to send bulk email. Unfortunately, the said newsletter service is not verifying the email address of...

August 12, 2016

Ask Laura: What should we be measuring?

By laura

4 Min read

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12August

Dear Laura, We are trying to evaluate the success of our email programs, and I don’t have a good sense of what metrics we should be monitoring. We have a lot of data, but I don’t have a good sense of what matters and what doesn’t. Can you advise us what we should look at and why? Thanks, Metrics Are Hard Dear Metrically-Challenged, You’re not going to like this answer, but here goes. It depends...

August 11, 2016

Are you (accidentally) supporting phishing

By laura

2 Min read

1 comment

11August

One of the themes in some of my recent talks has been how some marketers teach their customers to become victims of phishing. Typically I’m talking about how companies register domains “just for email” and then use those for bulk messages. If customers get used to mail from company.ESP.com and companyemail.com they’re going to believe that company-email.com is also you...

August 10, 2016

Learning to fish

By laura

1 Min read

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10August

I am honored to be included in the Learn to Fish document built by Adobe.

August 9, 2016

Email Marketing as News?

By laura

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09August

This afternoon I got mail. It’s clearly meant to be a tie-in to something. But, the thing is, I don’t know what.

That’s the problem with contextual marketing, you never really know if your target will understand the context.

August 8, 2016

BT Internet

By laura

1 Min read

10 comments

08August

I’ve been seeing reports for the last few weeks that a lot of folks are having problems getting mail into BT Internet. Many people are reporting the response smtp;554 Message rejected for policy reasons (3.2.2.1) – Please report any problems to BT via the postmaster btinternet.com mailbox and include your sending ip address with an example header of your email Unfortunately, the...

August 5, 2016

Beware the oversimplification

By laura

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05August

Setting up a DMARC record is the easy bit. Anyone can publish a record in DNS that will trigger reports to them. The challenge is what to do with those reports and now to manage them. DMARC is a complex protocol. It builds on two other protocols, each with their own nuances and implementation issues. I’ve written in the past about what DMARC is, what you need to know to decide if...

August 4, 2016

Internet security is national security?

By laura

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04August

This popped up on my FB feed yesterday.

What say you? Do we need to create a major effort to improve online security? What challenges do you see to making it work?
Edit: After I published this, I found an article stating that 3.7 million people had their personal health information compromised in a recent attack.

August 3, 2016

July 2016: The Month in Email

By laura

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03August

We got to slow down — and even take a brief vacation — in July, but we still managed to do a bit of blogging here and there, which I’ll recap below in case you missed anything. At the beginning of the month, I wrote about email address harvesting from LinkedIn. As you might imagine, I’m not a fan. A permissioned relationship on social media does not equate to permission to email...

August 2, 2016

The history of email

By laura

2 Min read

1 comment

02August

My first access to “the internet” was through a dialup modem on a VAX at the FDA. I was a summer intern there through my college career and then worked full time after graduation and before grad school. My email address ended in .bitnet. I could mail some places but not others. One of the places I couldn’t send mail was to my friends back on campus. A few of those friends were...