November 2016: The Month In Email

Happy December! Between #blackfriday, #cybermonday & #givingtuesday, pretty much everyone in the US has just survived a week of email from every brand and organization they’ve ever interacted with. Phew.
TurkeysforBlog
Is this still the best strategy for most senders? Maybe. But it’s always important to be adaptable and continue to evaluate and evolve your strategy as you move through the year.
As always, I continue to think about evolving our own strategies, and how we might best support senders and ESPs. One of the challenges we face when we talk to senders with deliverability questions is that so many of our answers fall into a nebulous “it depends” zone. We’re trying to articulate new ways to explain that to people, and to help them understand that the choices and details they specify at each point of their strategic planning and tactical execution have ramifications on their delivery. While “it depends” is still a correct answer, I’m going to try to avoid it going forward, and instead focus on exploring those choices and details with senders to help them improve deliverability.
In our community of deliverability and anti-abuse professionals, we are — as you’d expect — quite sensitive to unsolicited email that targets our industry. When an email circulates, even what seems like a reasonably well-thought-out email, it occasionally does not land well. Worse still are the various email-related product and service providers who try to legitimize B2B sales messaging as if it is something other than spam.
The takeaway from these discussions for senders is, as always: know your audience. This post about research from Litmus on millennials and spam is a great example of the kinds of things you might consider as you get to know your audience and how they prefer to communicate.
We also had a presidential election this month, one that made much of issues related to email, and it will be interesting to see how the candidates and parties use the email data they collected going forward.
In industry and security news, we saw over a million Google accounts breached by Android malware. We also saw some of the ramifications of a wildcard DNS entry from a domain name expiration — it’s an interesting “how things work” post if you’re curious. In other “how things work” news, we noted some of the recent changes AOL made to its FBL.
I answered an Ask Laura question about dedicated IP pools, and I have a few more queued up as well. As always, we want to know what questions are on the minds of our readers, so please feel free to send them over!

Google accounts breached
Outreach or spam?

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January 2016: The Month in Email

Jan2016_blogHappy 2016! We started off the year with a few different “predictions” posts. As always, I don’t expect to be right about everything, but it’s a useful exercise for us to look forward and think about where things are headed.
I joined nine other email experts for a Sparkpost webinar on 2016 predictions, which was a lot of fun (see my wrap up post here), and then I wrote a long post about security and authentication, which I think will be THE major topic in email this year both in policy and in practice (see my post about an exploit involving Trend Micro and another about hijacked Verizon addresses). Expect to hear more about this 2016 continues.
My other exciting January project was the launch of my “Ask Laura” column, which I hope will prove a great resource for people with questions about email. Please let me know if you have any questions you’d like to see me answer for your company or your clients — I’ll obscure any identifying information and generalize the answers to be most widely applicable for our readers.
In other industry news, it’s worth noting that Germany has ruled it illegal to harvest users’ address books (as Facebook and other services do). Why does that make sense? Because we’re seeing more and more phishing and scams that rely on social engineering.
In best practices, I wrote about triggered and transactional emails, how they differ, and what to consider when implementing them as part of your email program. Steve describes an easy-to-implement best practice that marketers often ignore: craft your mails so the most important information is shown as text.
I re-published an older post about SMTP rules that has a configuration checklist you might find useful as you troubleshoot any issues. And a newer issue you might be seeing is port25 blocking, which is important if you are hosting your own email senders or using SMTP to send to your ESP.
Finally, I put together some thoughts about reporting abuse. We work closely with high-volume abuse desks who use our Abacus software, and we know that it’s often not worth the time for an individual to report an incident – but I still think it’s worthwhile to have the infrastructure in place, and I wrote about why that is.

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Google accounts breached

Over 1 million Google accounts breached by Android malware.
There are some folks I know who really can’t understand why I stick with Apple over Android. The above issue is a big one. Doing what we do, security is a major consideration. I don’t need my accounts, or other accounts I have access to, compromised. It’s not that Apple is 100% compromise proof, but there are more checks and balances in the pipeline.
On the deliverability front, I had a recent interaction with someone from iCloud. This is a colleague I’ve worked with for years now, following him through multiple job changes. A client was having some delivery issues with a shared IP, so I was asking if he could send me some data to help track down the problem customer. I have a habit of asking for subject lines when I’m trying to get data. It’s usually enough for an ESP to track down the problem, and they’re not a way for folks to track down spamtraps or recipients. The answer I got back was sorry, they couldn’t give me any information at all, even something minor like a subject line.
Apple takes user privacy seriously and are doing a lot to protect their users. Does that mean I spend too much money on hardware I could buy cheaper? Perhaps. But, I’ll pay a little more to work with a company that puts privacy at the center of their product suite.

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Don't forget the strategy

We’re two days out from the beginning of the Holiday Shopping Season here in the US. Three days out from one of the biggest retail shopping days of the year in the US. 5 days out from one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.
I’m sure everyone has their mail campaigns planned. Most of the messages are finished, just waiting for a tweak or the exact right image.
The challenge, during this time of year, is to actually think strategically about marketing. The challenge is to pay attention to what subscribers and ISPs are telling you. The challenge is to adapt to conditions on the ground, rather than just executing a strategy planned months ago.
I often joke that my job gets quiet around this time of the year. Most of my clients and customers are busy executing their strategy, not planning it. So much mail is being slung around that no one really has time to do any thinking about it. That is, of course, a gross exaggeration, smart email marketers are always considering strategy even as they’re in the middle of the holiday mailing season.  They still pay attention, they adapt to the conditions, they get the mail through.
Just remember, 2016 is almost over. But we still have a lot of email to send first.

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