It’s been a light blogging month. We’ve been dancing around getting the final plans, financing, and contractors set up for the work we’re doing on the Dublin house and then heading off for our first actual vacation in almost 5 years. But, I wrote half of this answering a question on mailop, so I may as well polish and publish. What is FCrDNS FCrDNS stands for Full Circle reverse...
The key to improving deliverability
According to the UK DMA, marketers report improvements in deliverability after GDPR went into effect. I mean, thank you UK DMA for doing the research. Of course deliverability is going to improve when you send mail to those people who have expressly opted into your mail. 76% report an increase in open rates in the past 12 months; 75% say click- throughs are higher; 51% say ROI has risen. Opt-out...
Address verification doesn’t fix any real problem
Would you trust an address verification company that used twitter spam to advertise their product? Would you trust an address verification company that sent email spam to advertise their product? Would you trust an address verification company that sent email advertising their product to made up addresses? Would you trust an address verification company that sent email advertising their product...
Stop obsessing about open rates
In 2020: 250OK says open rates were much lower than ESPs report. The Only Influencers list hosts a discussion about the value and use of open rates. A potential client contacts me asking if I can get their open rates to a certain percentage.A client shows me evidence of 100% inboxing but wants to improve their open rate.An industry group runs sessions at multiple meetings discussing how...
The OSI Seven Layer Model
In the 1970s, while the early drafts of the Internet were being developed, a competing model for networking was being put together by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization). The OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) Model broke the work needed to implement a distributed network service into seven separate layers of abstraction, from the physical infrastructure at layer one all the...
Some Microsoft thoughts
Right at the end of January, Microsoft appears to have made couple of changes to how they’re handling authentication. The interesting piece of this is that, in both cases, Microsoft is taking authentication protocols and using them in ways that are slightly outside the spec, but are logical extensions of the spec. The first is an extension of DMARC. They’re rolling out inbox flags for...
Your first M3AAWG meeting
It’s that time of year again where nearly all my client calls involve the question, “are you going to be at M3AAWG SF?” Up until last year, the answer was always yes. But now it’s not a brief drive up the peninsula and a BART ride into the city, it’s a transatlantic plane flight. The clients I was talking with today said this was their first MAAWG and what did I...