Much like every other day, I got some spam today. Here’s a lightly edited copy of it. Let’s go through it and see what they did that makes it clear that it’s spam, which companies helped them out, and what you should avoid doing to avoid looking like these spammers… Received: from [213.144.59.132] (114.sub-75-210-142.myvzw.com [75.210.142.114] by m.wordtothewise.com...
For people who are on many discussion mailing lists, the first of every month is “Mailman Day”, and has been for nearly a decade. Mailman is the most widely used mailing list manager for discussion lists and, by default, it sends email to all subscribers on the first of the month reminding them that they’re still subscribed to the list and how to unsubscribe. This is really...
Spamtraps on a list are a symptom, not the disease itself. They’re (usually) a sign of some serious underlying problem, whether it be with address capture, bounce management, list purchase or epending. We’ve talked about this a lot in the past, but sometimes you need a short summary to refer someone to. Spamtrap Mythology A brief guide to spamtraps Spamtraps: should you care? Badly...
77% of those surveyed preferred email for permission-based promotional messages, soundly beating the next most popular, direct mail, at 9%. Email, still anything but dead.
This, and lots of other interesting things, in ExactTarget’s 2012 Channel Preference Survey.
This is a great story from Trey Harris about a real email delivery issue from the mid 1990s. Here’s a problem that sounded impossible… I almost regret posting the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a conference. 🙂 The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole...
We talk a lot about rules and best practices in email, but we’re mostly talking about “squishy” rules-of-thumb that are based on simplified models of how mail systems, spam filters, recipients, postmasters and blacklist operators behave. They’re the biology, ecology and sociology of the email ecosystem. There’s another set of rules we tend to only mention in passing...
You’re setting up a company (or a new division or maybe even a new brand) and you’d like to use email to communicate with your customers. In this series of posts I’m going to touch on some of the things you can do today to make email life easier for you in the future. Today’s final post is on DNS hosting and setup. 5. DNS hosting DNS is what lets you actually use the domain you’ve...
You’re setting up a company (or a new division or maybe even a new brand) and you’d like to use email to communicate with your customers. In this series of posts I’m going to touch on some of the things you can do today to make email life easier for you in the future. Today, domain registration. 3. Not all registrars are created equal Each domain suffix (.com, .co.uk, .org, .biz, etc.) is run by...
You’re setting up a company (or a new division or maybe even a new brand) and you’d like to use email to communicate with your customers. In this series of posts I’m going to touch on some of the things you can do today to make email life easier for you in the future. Today, choosing a domain name. 2. What… is your name? Your domain name is the keystone of your online branding, and...
You’re setting up a company (or a new division or maybe even a new brand) and you’d like to use email to communicate with your customers. In this series of posts I’m going to touch on some of the things you can do today to make email life easier for you in the future, starting with the naming of companies. 1. Like cats, a company needs three different names A name that’s...
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