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That unsubscribe time of year

Like many people, I make purchases online. This usually means the vendor adds me to their mailing list. I normally don’t care, that mail all filters to my “commercial” folder (my own personal version of tabs) and I can browse it at my leisure. At this time of year, though, email marketers go into a bit of overdrive and that folder fills with 20 – 30 or more emails a day...

Gmail speaks on image caching

Gmail released a blog post last week discussing their new image caching and why they implemented it. The short version is this is a way to improve the gmail user experience by screening images for malicious activity and serving the images faster from the Google caching machines.

The power of email marketing

Email is a helluva drug. That must be why I’m sitting here in a hotel room in Chicago where it’s minus something-a-lot outside and the roads are full of ice, salt and dingy snow. It seemed like such a great idea at the time. Virgin America sent me an email advertising a 20% off sale for 20 hours. Al has been bugging us to come visit him in Chicago for months and I could get a storming...

Unsubscribe preference centers

I unsubscribe from a lot of opt-in lists around this time of year. I’m generally unbothered by a couple emails a week from companies I’ve purchased from in the past. But, a lot of these companies drastically increase their volume mid-November. I may not be averse to 3 emails a week, but that absolutely does not mean I want 2 emails a day. One of those vendors presented me with one of...

FAQ about opens and Gmail caching

I had hoped to blog about something else today, but this still seems to be a big concern for a number of people. There are a lot of questions running around, some of which we don’t have answers to, others of which we have answers based on some evidence. It’s important to remember that we’ve seen Gmail roll things out and then roll things back and do phased transitions during...

More info about Gmail image caching

A lot of people are discussing the new Gmail image caching around the web. This doesn’t yet appear to be rolled out across all of Google’s network, so some people in different parts of the world are reporting different behaviors. This is leading to a little bit of confusion, as folks are reporting things like seeing multiple opens for a single image. These reports are clearly...

Email against Humanity

“Sending an email is one of the worst things you can do to a person. You are stealing a little part of their life away. 99.99% of all emails are incredibly annoying and a huge imposition. If your job is to write emails, you should always be fighting to send fewer things and make sure each email you send is so incredible that it’s a rare treat to hear from you.”
Cards Against Humanity at MailChimp

Gmail deploys image proxy servers

This afternoon Justin Foster of LiveClicker posted to the OnlyInfluencers list asking about Gmail rewriting links. Sometime very recently (last 24-48 hours), we are seeing that Google made a change to Gmail such that all image URLs in the email content are replaced by a call to Google’s content caching service googleusercontent.com. For example, an image with the src: “; will be...

Canada announces CASL regulation start date

This morning Industry Canada published its final regulations regarding the implementation of the Canadian Anti-Spam Law. Email related provisions of the law will take effect June 1, 2014. What does this mean? It means that anyone sending mail from Canada or anyone sending mail that is accessed in Canada is required to have explicit opt-in consent for sending that mail, with a few exceptions...

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