Authorlaura

February 17, 2020

Address verification doesn’t fix any real problem

By laura

8 Min read

2 comments

17February

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...

February 12, 2020

Stop obsessing about open rates

By laura

2 Min read

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12February

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...

February 10, 2020

Some Microsoft thoughts

By laura

3 Min read

6 comments

10February

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...

February 4, 2020

Your first M3AAWG meeting

By laura

3 Min read

1 comment

04February

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...

January 30, 2020

When opens hurt reputation

By laura

4 Min read

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30January

Podia has scraped the Word to the Wise blog and I’m currently receiving an ongoing drip campaign from them absolutely begging me to mention them in my blog post on cold emails. I get maybe a dozen of this style of email a week. It’s pretty annoying but whatever. I delete them, blog about them or, very occasionally, share them with some folks who might have a big bigger of a stick to...

January 29, 2020

Using Reply-To:

By laura

1 Min read

4 comments

29January

Yesterday I learned that some ESPs don’t support the reply to: address. I asked around to discover which ESPs did. Here’s what I learned. ESPs that support reply-to: ActiveCampaignAmazonSESConstantContactCampaign MonitorCordialDelivraDoListEloquaEmmaEpsilonGetResponseHubSpotiContactListrakMailkitMailUpMarketoN6PardotwordResponsysSailthruSFMCSharpspringTwilio / SendGridZeta Global...

January 27, 2020

Troubleshooting: part 3

By laura

3 Min read

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27January

As I continue to think about how people troubleshoot email delivery I keep finding other things to talk about. Today we’re going to talk about the question most folks start with when troubleshooting delivery. “Did ISP change something?” At least once a week I check some delivery or email fora and some form of the question is sitting there. “Did X change something? We...

January 23, 2020

What about the email client?

By laura

1 Min read

2 comments

23January

There are a lot of folks in the email industry that take issue with my stance that DMARC is not a viable solution to phishing. DMARC, at it’s absolute best, addresses one tiny, TINY piece of phishing. Look at this message I received today. My mail client presents this as from Quickbooks and hides the actual from email address from me. Most mail clients do that by default. It is possible to...

January 20, 2020

Same MX, different filters

By laura

2 Min read

1 comment

20January

One of the things I do for clients is look at who is really handling mail for their subscribers. Steve’s written a nifty tool that does a MX lookup for a list of domains. Then I have a SQL script that takes the raw MX lookup and categorizes not by the domain or even the MX, but by the underlying mail filter. Part of that script classifies domains hosted by Google apps as a separate filter...

January 15, 2020

The variables are not independent

By laura

3 Min read

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15January

In my previous career I was a molecular biologist. Much of my work was done on bacteria but after I left grad school, I ended up working in a developmental biology lab. Bacteria were (mostly) simple: just about every trait was controlled by a single gene. We could study what that gene did by removing it from the bacteria or adding it to a well characterised bacteria. When I moved to developmental...