Blogging

It’s been a wild week here in the US. I have to admit, the current political climate is affecting my ability to blog about email. I’ve always said email is not life or death. And how can I focus on the minutia of deliverability when things are in such turmoil and uncertainty? There are many things I want to write about, including some resources for those of us who are struggling with the current administration and changes in the US. What we can do. What we must do.  It just takes work and focus I don’t have right now.
 
 

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Phone call of the week

I phoneforblogreceived a message on our 800 number. “This is Mark from a-website.example. Your customers are complaining to me that they are not getting my mail. And you’re blocking mail from me. Explain this to me!”
 
 
I called him back and left a message: “I think you’re confused and I probably can’t help you.”
A few minutes later, Mark returns my call.
L: Hi, this is laura.
M: Who are you? You called me, you must be from Clearwire!
L: No, I’m not with Clearwire, I’m with WttW.
M: Then why is your phone number on the Clearwire website?
L: I don’t know, but this isn’t Clearwire. The Clearwire website is redirecting to Sprint. They got bought out a while ago.
M: Redirecting to Sprint? What does that mean? Your phone number is on Clearwire’s website. You must be with Clearwire.
L: No, really, I’m not.
M: Why is your phone number on their website?
L: I don’t know. But this is not Clearwire. (I start searching the blog because I remember some post somewhere about Clearwire.)
M: Well, who are you?
L: I run a delivery consulting firm. Is it possible you found my website and the blog post that says all clearwire.net addresses are being discontinued April 15, 2015?
M: They’re gone?
L: Yes, for more than a year now.
M: Oh.
scene
That blog post is the #1 google hit if you search for clearwire.net.
 

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And… we're back from London

The Email Innovations Summit in London was a good conference. Much smaller than Vegas, but with a number of very interesting talks. I got to meet a number of folks I’ve only known online and we had some interesting conversations at the conference and at the pub-track in the evenings.
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I had so many grand plans for doing some work while in London. So many plans. And then I actually mostly disconnected and ignored anything I “should” be doing.  Instead, Steve and I did some touristing, some relaxing, some family time and some connecting with his college friends. We also (over)heard a lot of conversations about the US Election. One night at dinner every table around us was talking about our candidates and what they thought of them. It’s always interesting to hear what non-Americans think about our country.
In addition to missing two debates, it seems we missed some online news, too. I think the biggest thing was another large DDoS attack against that took out many major websites. I’m starting to see some comments that spam levels were down during the attack, too, but haven’t dug into that yet.
I did have an article published in the Only Influencers newsletter last week: Marketers Can’t Learn from Spam. All too often marketers think spammers are better at unboxing because they see spam in their inbox. But spammers are just more criminal and spend a lot of effort trying to bypass filters. These aren’t lessons marketers can learn from.
Unfortunately, due to our London trip, we are going to miss M3AAWG in Paris, which starts today. Two weeks between conferences was exactly the wrong time for going to both. Never fear, many folks will be tweeting what they can using #m3aawg38.
We’re both slowly getting back into the swing (and timezone!) of back to work. Blogging will pick up over the next few days. And I have new castle pictures to share.

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Holiday season

We’re 10 days out from Christmas, 9 days out from the end of binge-shopping-season (and 11 days out from return season). Unlike previous years, I haven’t heard of any significant delivery challenges. Most of what I’m hearing is the normal day-to-day stuff. There’s a little more of it, but nothing like in years past where ISPs melted down or giant companies got SBLed.
This is all good! This is progress and is great for senders.
Things here, and I’m pretty sure many other places are slowing down. We’re looking forward to next year, to new projects and clients, to new challenges and changes.
Blogging will probably be slow from now through the end of the year. I have stuff to talk about, but the issues are complex and I’m working on the best way to write about them. And I’m coming to the decision that writing might not be the best for certain posts.

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