April 2017: The Month in Email

April was a big travel month for us. I went to Las Vegas for meetings around the Email Innovations Summit and to New Orleans, where Steve spoke on the closing keynote panel for the EEC conference.
I wrote several posts this month about privacy and tracking, both in email and in other online contexts. It’s increasingly a fact of life that our behaviors are tracked, and I wrote about the need for transparency between companies and those they are tracking. More specifically, I talked about the tradeoffs between convenience and security, and how people may not be aware that they are making these tradeoffs when they use popular mailbox tools like unroll.me. The folks over at ReturnPath added a comment on that post about how they handle privacy issues with their mailbox tools.
Steve contributed several posts this month. First up, a due diligence story about how service providers might look more closely at potential customers for their messaging platforms to help curtail spam and other fraudulent activity. He also looked at the history of “/8” IP blocks, and what is happening to them as the internet moves to IPv6. Steve also added a note about his new DMARC Validation tool, which rounds out a suite of free tools we’ve made available on our site. And finally, he showcased a particularly great email subscription experience from Tor.com — have a look!
I highlighted another post about companies doing things right, this one by Len Shneyder over at Marketingland. In other best practices news, I talked about bounce handling again (I mentioned it last month too), and how complicated it can be. Other things that are complicated: responding to abuse complaints. Do you respond? Why or why not?
Our friends at Sendgrid wrote a great post on defining what spammers and other malicious actors do via email, which I think is a must-read for email marketers looking to steer clear of such activity. Speaking of malicious actors, I wrote two posts on the arrest of one of the world’s top email criminals, Peter Levashov, and speculation that he was involved in the Russian hacking activity around the US elections. We’re looking forward to learning more about that story as it unfolds.

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April 2016: The Month in Email

We are finishing up another busy month at WttW. April was a little nutty with network glitches, server crashes, cat woes, and other disruptions, but hopefully that’s all behind us as we head into May. I’ll be very busy in May as well, speaking at Salesforce Connections in Atlanta and the Email Innovation Summit in Las Vegas. Please come say hello if you’re attending either of these great events.
April2016MiE
Speaking of great events, I participated in two panels at EEC16 last month. We had a lot of great audience participation, and I met many wonderful colleagues. I wrote up some more thoughts about the conference here. I also had a nice conversation with the folks over at Podbox, and they’ve posted my interview on their site.
In the Podbox interview, as always, I talked about sending mail people want to receive. It always makes me roll my eyes a bit when I see articles with titles like “5 Simple Ways to Reach the Inbox”, so I wrote a bit about that here. In addition to sending mail people want to receive, senders need to make sure they are collecting addresses and building lists in thoughtful and sustainable ways. For more on this topic, check out my post on list brokers and purchased lists.
These same not-so-simple tricks came up again in my discussion of Gmail filters. Everyone wants a magic formula to reach the inbox, and — sorry to burst your bubble — there isn’t ever going to be one. And this is for a good reason: a healthy filter ecosystem helps protect all of us from malicious senders and criminal activity. The email channel is particularly vulnerable to fraud and theft. The constant evolution of filters is one way mail providers can help protect both senders and recipients — but it can be challenging for senders and systems administrators to keep up with this constant evolution. For example, companies sometimes even inadvertently filter their own mail!
I also wrote a bit about how B2B spam is different from B2C spam, and how marketers can better comply with CAN SPAM guidelines in order to reach the inbox. We also republished our much-missed friend and colleague J.D. Falk’s DKIM Primer, which is extremely useful information that was at a no-longer-active link.
One of my favorite posts this month was about “dueling data”, and how to interpret seemingly different findings around email engagement. We also got some good questions for my “Ask Laura” column, where we cover general topics on email delivery. This month we looked at “no auth/no entry” and the Microsoft Smartscreen filter, both of which are useful things to understand for optimizing delivery.
Finally, we are pleased to announce that we’ve joined the i2Coalition, an organization of internet infrastructure providers. They posted a nice introduction on their blog, and we look forward to working with them to help advocate and protect these important technical infrastructures.

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August 2015: The month in review

It’s been a busy blogging month and we’ve all written about challenges and best practices. I found myself advocating that any company that does email marketing really must have a well-defined delivery strategy. Email is such vital part of how most companies communicate with customers and potential customers, and the delivery landscape continues to increase in complexity (see my post on pattern matching for a more abstract look at how people tend to think about filters and getting to the inbox). Successful email marketers are proactive about delivery strategy and are able to respond quickly as issues arise. Stay tuned for more from us on this topic.
I also wrote up some deliverability advice for the DNC, which I think is valuable for anyone looking at how to maintain engagement with a list over time.  It’s also worth thinking about in the context of how to re-engage a list that may have been stagnant for a while. A comment on that post inspired a followup discussion about how delivery decisions get made, and whether an individual person in the process could impact something like an election through these delivery decisions. What do you think?
As we frequently point out, “best practices” in delivery evolve over time, and all too often, companies set up mail programs and never go back to check that things continue to run properly. We talked about how to check your tech, as well as what to monitor during and after a send. Josh wrote about utilizing all of your data across multiple mail streams, which is critical for understanding how you’re engaging with your recipients, as well as the importance of continuous testing to see what content and presentation strategies work best for those recipients.
Speaking of recipients, we wrote a bit about online identity and the implications of unverified email addresses in regards to the Ashley Madison hack and cautioned about false data and what might result from the release of that data.
Steve’s in-depth technical series for August was a two-part look at TXT records — what they are and how to use them — and he explains that the ways people use these, properly and improperly, can have a real impact on your sends.
In spam news, the self-proclaimed Spam King Sanford Wallace is still spamming, despite numerous judgments against him and his most recent guilty plea this month. For anyone else still confused about spam, the FTC answered some questions on the topic. It’s a good intro or refresher to share with colleagues. We also wrote about the impact of botnets on the inbox (TL;DR version: not much. The bulk of the problem for end users continues to be people making poor marketing decisions.) In other fraud news, we wrote about a significant spearphishing case and how DMARC may or may not help companies protect themselves.

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February 2015 – The month in email

This was a short and busy month at WttW!

We attended another great M3AAWG conference, and had our usual share of interesting discussions, networking, and cocktails. I recapped our adventures here, and shared a photo of the people who keep your email safe while wearing kilts as well. We also commended Jayne Hitchcock on winning the Mary Litynski award for her work fighting abuse and cyberstalking.

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