Industry news

Just some stuff going on around email that probably merit a mention but not a whole blog post.
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Next Tuesday at 1 eastern I’ll be giving a webinar on the subscription bombing and discussing what companies can do to mitigate the problem.
Google is working on new “invisible” captchas, that separate out humans from bots without humans having to do anything.
EmailonAcid created an interactive puzzle email.
Return Path acquired Email Copilot. Then laid off approximately 60 employees citing restructuring (no links for this one, but emails were sent to customers and someone forwarded me a copy).
Mailchimp sent 1.5 billion emails on Black Friday, and published stats and information about how well they delivered and performed.
 

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Laura's Speaking Events early 2016

My speaking schedule is coming together for Q1 and Q2 this year.
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Email Evolution Conference. March 30 – April 1. New Orleans, LA. I’ll be participating on the “All You Ever Wanted to Know about Deliverability (But Were Afraid to Ask)” panel Friday Morning. The other panelists are Chris Arrendale, Alyssa Nahatis and Matthew Vernhout. This panel should be quite a bit of fun, as we all know each other and have collaborated in the past. I’m looking forward to it. Come prepared with questions!
Salesforce Connections. May 10 – 12. Atlanta, GA. Another panel on deliverability, this time with Mickey Chandler from SFMC and Melinda Plemel from ReturnPath. We’ll each bet giving our 3 best tips to improve deliverability and then be taking questions from the audience. We have all been around a long time, in fact Mickey used to work for me at MAPS back in 2000. We’re all ready to answer those questions you’ve always had but never known who to ask.
Email Innovations Summit. May 17 – 19. Las Vegas, NV.  Not a panel! I’ll be speaking about the technical things happening around email that will affect sending, marketing and deliverability. If you ever wanted to know how to talk to the technical folks this is the session to come to. I’ll be explaining some of the terminology and teaching attendees what they need to care about and what they just need to know exists. Register with my code (SPKATK) and save 15%.

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October 2016: The Month in Email

We’ve returned from London, where I spoke at the Email Innovations Summit and enjoyed a bit of vacation. My wrap-up post also mentions an article I wrote for the Only Influencers site, which looks at questions I get asked frequently: “Why does spam make it to the inbox and our legitimate marketing email doesn’t? Should we just copy their tactics?”
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In industry news, Yahoo caught our attention for two surprising moves: disabling forwarding and — much more disturbing — creating software for intelligence agencies to search customer email.
Some legal updates this month: The Second Court of Appeals upheld an earlier ruling that companies are in fact liable for the activities of their affiliates, including spam and fraudulent claims. This is important, as we often see spammers and cybercriminals use affiliates to distance themselves from these activities. We also saw another fine assessed for a violation of CASL, and noted with appreciation the transparency and thoughtful process that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) demonstrates in explaining their actions.
Another excellent report is the one created by the Exploratorium to explain their recent experience with being phished. It’s a good piece to share with your organization, in that it reminds us that these cybercriminals are exploiting not just our technology but our trust-based connections to our friends and colleagues. It’s important to raise awareness about social engineering as a part of information security. And speaking of email security, we were delighted to note that André Leduc received the 2016 J.D. Falk award this month at M3AAWG for his excellent work on this topic. It’s a fitting legacy to our friend, J.D., who died five years ago this month. We miss him.
Finally, we’d be remiss in observing Halloween without a post about zombies. Feel free to read it aloud in your spookiest voice.

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Podbox Expert Interview Series

Last month I did an interview with Podbox about email, deliverability and how I became an email expert (breaking things, lots of breaking things… and having to pick up the pieces and fix them…)
Check out the interview over on their website.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about history and longevity. Next year will mark 10 years of the Word to the Wise blog and 20 years of me entering the anti-spam / deliverability space. That’s a lot of time. When I first started fighting spam it was really about my mailbox and getting rid of the junk I was receiving. At the time, a lot of people thought it was silly to spend so much effort fighting spam.
But as time as gone on, email spam and fraud became a big deal. Criminals realized they could use spam to further their gains at the expense of people. Spam is a network problem. Spam is a danger.
Personally, I’ve moved away from fighting spam. I’m now working more on making and keeping email a useful tool. Yes, that does include commercial email. Yes, it does include bulk email. Helping people get the mail they want in their inbox is a part of keeping the email ecosystem healthy. It’s the part I can do and the part I am good at.
Seeing email become such an important part of commerce, communication and modern life has been a journey. I look forward to seeing where the next 20 years takes us.
 

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