Authorlaura

Email addiction survey

The great folks over at Zettasphere and Emailmonday have released their Email Addiction Survey. Nothing surprising in the data that I can see, although I suspect one particular data point is going to surprise folks. Yup, more than 70% of people don’t really care about a do not reply address in a message. Honestly, I’m not surprised. Most users don’t really care. In all honesty...

Return Path FBL page down

As of 6pm UTC the fbl.returnpath.com website is down. Return Path are aware of the issue and are working to fix it. I haven’t seen any estimated time to fix.
But, it’s not just you and they are aware.
EDIT: And 30 minutes after I posted this, it’s back. All fixed! Go and submit your FBL changes.

Why aren’t they answering my emails?

Anyone actively handling deliverability issues has had the experience of submitting a ticket or email and receiving no response. Alternatively, we get a boilerplate response that seems to not address the question. It happens to me, it happens to colleagues, it happens to everyone. One of the biggest challenges we face is taking that lack of response and channeling it into action items for our...

Dedicated IPs, pros and cons

There’s a whole belief system built around the idea that the best way to get good deliverability is to have your own dedicated IPs. In fact, senders regularly approach me to ask when is the right time for them to get a dedicated IP. They assume all their deliverability problems will disappear if they get a dedicated IP. Generally they’ve not asked the most important question: should...

Tools aren’t a luxury

I was on the phone with a colleague recently. They were talking about collecting a bit of data over the weekend and mentioned how great it was they had the tools to be able to do this. Coincidentally, another colleague mentioned that when the subscription bombing happened they were able to react quickly because they had a decent tool chain. I’ve also been working with some clients who are...

Thinking about filters

Much of the current deliverability advice focuses on a few key ideas: Authenticate your mail with SPF, DKIM and DMARC Use a dedicated IP. Monitor delivery. Clean your data. All of these things are absolutely things you should be doing, but senders can do all these things and still have cruddy delivery. These things are great and can help your mail deliver better. But they’re not enough to...

SaaS systems are spammer targets

There are probably hundreds of thousands of really awesome SaaS products out there. They provide a framework to do all sorts of stuff that used to be really hard to do. Almost all of them include some email component. They dutifully build the email piece into their platform and, because they’re smart, they outsource the actual sending to one of SMTP providers. They’re happy, their...

Transactional mail can be spam

Marketers have a thing about transactional mail. In the US, transactional mail is exempt from many of the CAN SPAM regulations. If they label a mail transactional, then they can send it even when the recipient has opted-out! The smart marketer looks for opportunities to send transactional mail so they can bother spam get their brand in front of people who’ve opted out. Enter the...

Resources for safer conferences

The MAAWG conference was held in Brooklyn a few weeks ago. Many positive discussions and sessions happened at the conference. But there was an incident of harassment during the conference where one participant assaulted multiple other attendees during late evening activities. I’m not going to speak too much to what happened as I wasn’t there. What I will say is that I am proud of my...

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