Email is a “store and forward” protocol. The sender doesn’t connect directly to the recipient to send the mail with just one network hop, rather the sender connects to a mailserver (usually referred to as an “MTA”, short for Mail Transfer Agent) and sends the message there. Once that MTA has received the message it sends it on to another MTA, and so on until it...
There’s an old-school ’90s HTML design trick that dates back to the dim and distant past before we had decent layout control in CSS. That’s “slicing” – chopping a large image up into multiple parts, then reassembling them in an HTML table. If you slice your images in an email and the end user hasn’t loaded images what will they see? They’ll see a...
Who are Rpost? Rpost are an email service provider of sorts. You may not have heard of them, as they focus on a fairly niche market – electronic contract and document delivery. Their main services are “Registered Email” – which provides the sender of the message with proof that the recipient has read the message, and proof of the content of the message, and...
The default mail client on OS X is Mail.app. In recent versions it does it’s best to bundle threads of email together to make it easier for you to keep track of conversations via email – they appear in the list of messages as a single entry with a badge showing the number of messages in that thread. There are standard ways to track mail threads, but they sometimes get broken by...
Your mail is being blocked or deferred and you’d like to know why. Before you ask someone “why?” you should have done these things: Read the rejection message If the rejection message contains a URL, read the page it points to Saved a full copy of the message that was sent And you should have some pieces of information ready. If you’re asking via email, put this...
@LorenMcDonald over at SilverPop has an interesting comparison of the email marketing habits of the two presidential campaigns:
I checked our SenderScore earlier this month, as quite a few people mentioned that they’d seen SenderScore changes – likely due to changed algorithms and new data sources. It sure looks like something changed. Our SenderScore was, for a while, zero out of a hundred. That’s as bad as it’s possible to get. I didn’t get a screenshot of the zero score, but I grabbed...
Kickstarter’s success has made a lot of people pay attention to the concept of crowdfunding. At it’s best, crowdfunding investment allows fans of an artist to send her money to directly support her work, and get something special out of it. At it’s worst, it’s photoshopped fake products, dubious consumer electronics and videogame projects from the implausible to outright...
Why does it take “10 business days” to process an unsubscription request? It almost never does. An unsubscription request will often take effect instantly and it would be rare that it would take more than a few business days. So why do some businesses say your email address will be removed “within 10 business days” when they know it’ll be almost immediate? It’s...
More than just PGP Cryptography is the science of securing communication from adversaries. In the email world it’s most obvious use is tools like PGP or S/MIME that are used to encrypt a message so that it can only be read by the intended recipient, or to sign a message so that the recipient can be sure of who it came from. There are quite a few other aspects of sending email where a little...
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