Authorlaura

September 15, 2022

Gmail Program for Election Mail

By laura

13 Min read

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15September

A few months ago, Google made a splash in the political press and the email marketing space when they asked the FEC the following question: May Google launch a free and non-partisan pilot program to test Gmail design features, which will be open to authorized candidate committees, political party committees, and leadership political action committees, where spam detection as applied to messages...

July 28, 2022

Confidential to ESPs

By laura

6 Min read

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28July

Dear Colleagues at ESPs, We have a problem. More specifically, YOU have a problem. You have a spam problem. One that you’re not taking care of in any way, shape or form. There was a point where ESPs started caring about spam out of their networks. They got blocked enough they had to take action. Because they took action a lot of the big blocklists started being nice. Spamhaus, for instance...

July 6, 2022

When best practices don’t work

By laura

3 Min read

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06July

I started out with the best intentions to get back into the swing of things with blogging more regularly. But between MAAWG recovery, COVID recovery and life it’s not worked out that way. This is an excerpt of something I wrote over on slack to explain why someone was still struggling with delivery even though best practices weren’t working. Hope it will be helpful for some folks...

June 13, 2022

The gang is trickling in

By laura

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13June

It’s been a few years since we’ve actually made it to a MAAWG. We missed much of 2018 and 2019 due to our international move. Then 2020 San Francisco conflicted with a personal engagement. Then, well, pandemic hit and it’s been virtual and then we were moving and … wow, it’s been busy! We did make it to London, though, and have started reconnecting with colleagues...

June 6, 2022

ESPs need to step up their compliance game

By laura

4 Min read

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06June

I don’t send a lot of spam complaints generally. Mostly I block and move on. There are some companies, though, that I offer the professional courtesy of sending a complaint or a report to their abuse@ address. Former clients, friends and colleagues generally get that courtesy. The number of ESPs that completely fail to take any action is disappointing. Too many of them can’t even...

June 3, 2022

Stop with the incorrect SPF advice

By laura

5 Min read

7 comments

03June

Another day, another ESP telling a client to publish a SPF include for the wrong domain. It shouldn’t annoy me, really. It’s mostly harmless and it’s just an extra DNS look up for most companies. Heck, we followed Mailchimp’s advice and added their include to our bare root domain and it’s not really a huge deal for companies with only a couple SaaS providers. Still...

May 30, 2022

Message not compliant with the RFCs

By laura

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30May

Every once in a while we’ll see a rejection from Yahoo that says RFCs 554 5.0.0 Message not accepted due to failed RFC compliance. What does that mean and what can we do about it? It really does mean exactly what it says on the label: there’s something about the message that is not in compliance with any number of RFCs and are not going to accept the message in its current state. When...

May 11, 2022

Cleaning old lists

By laura

4 Min read

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11May

There comes a time in many marketers’ lives where they are faced with and old, stale database and a management chain that wants to mail those addresses. Smart marketers know that delivery problems will arise if they just reactivate all those users. They also know that mailing older addresses can affect current and engaged addresses as well. Still, many executives think there is no downside...

June 10, 2021

About the Apple thing

By laura

8 Min read

5 comments

10June

A lot of folks are talking about Apple’s recent announcement about building privacy protection into email. I have somewhat stayed out of the conversation and I’m not sure what I really think about it. This is a change to how a lot of folks use email and no one really likes change. I actually have a post I’ve been quietly working on talking about open rates. From my perspective...

March 18, 2021

Domains and Reputation

By laura

3 Min read

1 comment

18March

(Copied and lightly edited from a Facebook post) It occurred to me as I was commenting elsewhere that there is a lot of confusion about domains / subdomains and where they’re used in emails.I get confused when people talk about ‘domain reputation’ because I have at least 4 distinct places where domains show up in an email that heavily influence delivery. But a lot of other folks...