One of the client projects I’m working on includes doing a lot of research on MXs, including some classification work. Part of the work involves identifying the company running the MX. Many of the times this is obvious; mail.protection.outlook.com is office365, for instance. There are other cases where the connection between the MX and the host company is not as obvious. That’s where...
Happy 2018
This is the time of year when everyone starts posting their predictions for the coming year. Despite over a decade of blogging and close to 2500 blog posts, I have’t consistently written prediction articles here. Many years I don’t see big changes on the horizon, so there’s not a lot to comment on. Incremental changes are status quo, nothing earth shattering there. But...
November 2017: The Month in Email
We’re in the thick of the busiest time of the year for email. It’s been so busy, in fact, that we’ve seen some slowdowns and delivery issues across the email universe. It may be worth thinking about alternate strategies for end of year promotions beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I was delighted to chat with Julia Angwin for her ProPublica piece on subscription bombing and abuse prevention...
Email Marketing Trends from Freshmail
[#INFOGRAPHIC] Email marketing trends 2018
It’s always an honor to be asked to provide quotes and thoughts with experts in the field. Sometimes the day to day gives me tunnel vision, but things like this give me the opportunity to think more globally. Hands down, though, the best part is seeing the final product and hearing what other folks have to say.
Go check out the full infographic.
About that DMARC "exploit"
A security researcher has identified a rendering flaw that allows for “perfect” phishing emails. From his website: Mailsploit is a collection of bugs in email clients that allow effective sender spoofing and code injection attacks. The spoofing is not detected by Mail Transfer Agents (MTA) aka email servers, therefore circumventing spoofing protection mechanisms such as DMARC...
Deliverability is critical for marketing
It is increasingly clear that successful email marketing programs measure and emphasize deliverability. No longer is deliverability the crisis management team called when everything breaks. They’re part and parcel of an effective email marketing team. Today I watched a bit of the EIS livestream where acquisition marketers were discussing their processes. Everyone of them talked about things...
Microsoft MXs changed over
Today on MailOp it was announced that the migration of Microsoft freemail domains to the office 365 backend. Over the next week the mx*.hotmail.com mail servers will stop working. Check your settings, folks, and make sure you’re correctly querying DNS before sending.
Vodafone New Zealand: sorta shutting down
Vodafone NZ is shutting down mail handling for the following domains as of today, Nov 30, 2017. clear.net.nz es.co.nz ihug.co.nz paradise.net.nz pcconnect.co.nz quik.co.nz vodafone.co.nz vodafone.net.nz wave.co.nz According to their website, this is primarily due to an elderly platform that’s not meeting the needs of their users, including long mail delays and too much spam. The FAQ they...
Not fooling anyone…
A question came up on the Women of Email Facebook page about sending cold B2B emails. This is one of those areas I have strong opinions about, mostly because I am so tired of getting deceptive and unending messages from folks. Realistically, cold emailing isn’t going to stop just because recipients hate receiving it. We haven’t wiped out spam in 20+ years, we’re not going to...
It's not a technical problem
You can’t technical your way out of the bulk folder. I wrote that a year and a half ago, and it’s even more true today. Filters at the big webmail providers continue to evolve to meet new threats and new spamming techniques. Sending technically perfect mail won’t get your mail into the inbox. Recipients have to want the mail and interact with the mail for good delivery.