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Bounces at Verizon

There have been lots of reports of Verizon rejecting valid email addresses for a few hours this morning. They seem to have fixed things now but you probably want to make sure you didn’t suppress those addresses.

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SWAKS: the SMTP Swiss Army Knife

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SWAKS is a general purpose testing tool for SMTP. For basic SMTP testing it’s a more convenient, scriptable alternative to running a transaction by hand, but it also lets you test things that are difficult to do manually, such as authentication or TLS encryption.
It’s a perl script that installs fairly easily on OS X or any Linux/unix system (and can be installed on Windows, if you have perl installed there).
It’s pretty well documented, but it can be a bit overwhelming to start with. Here are some simple recipes:
Send a test email:

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M3AAWG Boston

The tri-annual procession of Facebook friends and colleagues to a disclosed location to talk about messaging, abuse and prevention started over the weekend.  For me, this M³AAWG conference marks the beginning of a new chapter. We’re hiring, and even before the conference officially started I’ve had some productive conversations with people about what we’re looking for and how we see the company growing. M³AAWG is always a little like a reunion. I’ve been working with some of the people present for more than a dozen years, and some I’ve known for even longer. The conference is work, they mean the “working group” part of their name, but it’s also a time to create and maintain the community that keeps our online messaging from being overwhelmed. If you’re here, drop by and say hi (and don’t forget to visit my session on Thursday afternoon)! Otherwise, watch this space as I share what insights I can about the information presented.

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CASL enforcement

As most people know, the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL) went into effect July 1 of this year. This month, the CRTC concluded its first investigation.

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We're growing… and hiring

The last year has been a time of growth here at Word to the Wise. You’ve seen some of this in our new website and branding. The result of this investment in the company has translated to more, and more interesting, consulting work.
It’s possible you’ve noticed that I’ve not been blogging as much over the last couple months. Steve’s picked up the slack admirably and posted a number of great technical posts. In all honesty, though, I’ve missed the chance to talk about email topics here on the blog. It’s not that I’ve been avoiding blogging, I’ve just been very busy handling our growing client base.
In order to better meet the demand for our services, we’re hiring our first deliverability consultant. We’re looking for a self starter with strong communications skills, understands email and delivery and who can adapt to a fast changing environment.

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I can't click through if you don't exist

Recipients can’t click through if you don’t exist
A tale of misconfigured DNS wrecking someone’s campaign.
I got mail this morning from A Large Computer Supplier, asking me to fill in a survey about them. I had some feedback for them, mostly along the lines of “It’s been two decades since I bought anything other than rackmount servers from you, maybe I’m not a good advertising target for $200 consumer laptops?” so I clicked the link.
 
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(I’ve replaced the real domain with survey.example.com in this post, to protect the innocent, but everything else is authentic).
That’s not good. The friendly error messages web browsers give sometimes hide the underlying problem, but that looks like a DNS problem. Did they do something stupid, like putting the wrong URL in the mail they sent?
 

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ISP filters are good for marketers

A throwback post from 2010 Attention is a limited resource.
Marketing is all about grabbing attention. You can’t run a successful marketing program without first grabbing attention. But attention is a limited resource. There are only so many things a person can remember, focus on or interact with at any one time.
In many marketing channels there is an outside limit on the amount of attention a marketer can grab. There are only so many minutes available for marketing in a TV or radio hour and they cost real dollars. There’s only so much page space available for press. Billboards cost real money and you can’t just put a billboard up anywhere. With email marketing, there are no such costs and thus a recipient can be trivially and easily overwhelmed by marketers trying to grab their attention.
Whether its unsolicited email or just sending overly frequent solicited email, an overly full mailbox overwhelms the recipient. When this happens, they’ll start blocking mail, or hitting “this is spam” or just abandoning that email address. Faced with an overflowing inbox recipients may take drastic action in order to focus on the stuff that is really important to them.
This is a reality that many marketers don’t get. They think that they can assume that if a person purchases from their company that person wants communication from that company.

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Does volume cause blocking?

There seems to be a never ending debate about volume and how it affects delivery and revenue. I regularly get questions asking if ISPs block senders just for volume.
The answer is no. Unless you’re actually sending enough mail to overwhelm the incoming infrastructure, something that’s difficult on today’s internet, you’re unlikely to be blocked due to simply sending a high volume of mail.
Sending mail recipients don’t want, or mail that looks like spam, that will get the mail blocked or filtered.

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Yahoo.com on FCC wireless "do not mail" list

Update: As of mid-morning pacific time on 10/7 yahoo.com has been removed from the FCC list.
As part of CAN SPAM the FCC maintains a list of wireless domains that require proof of permission to send mail to. Recently, various email folks noticed that yahoo.com was added to this list.
According to the law, senders have 30 days to meet the permission standards for any recipients at domains on the FCC list. In practical terms what this means is that the FCC and Yahoo have 30 days to fix this error and get yahoo.com off the list. Based on conversations with people who’ve talked to Yahoo and the FCC this is in the process of happening.
This isn’t the first time a non-wireless domain has been added to the FCC list.
As a sender what should you do with your yahoo.com subscribers?
Right now, nothing. There is a 30 day grace period between when a domain goes on the FCC list and when senders need to comply. I have every expectation that this will be removed in less than 30 days.
But what if it’s not?
In that case you will need to segregate out yahoo.com subscribers in 30 days and not mail them until the domain is removed from the FCC list. While I can’t actively suggest ignoring the law, it’s unlikely that the FCC is going to start coming after senders for mailing yahoo.com addresses once the 30 days are up.
More information: Al Iverson’s Spam Resource.

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Email marketing not dead yet

If Forrester research is to be believe, email marketing is feeling better. In fact, it seems email marketing is more effective than ever.

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