Earlier this week Return Path released their quarterly inbox placement benchmark study, and the results aren’t good. According to this data, 22% of opt-in emails are not making it to the inbox. An interesting note is that 25% of email from social networks never makes it to the inbox. This is a challenge for social networks, but I’m not sure many individuals care. For a lot of people...
A number of people have mentioned over the last week or so that they’re seeing a lot of outages, failures and general ickiness with SNDS. I contacted Microsoft and asked about it. SNDS has been undergoing some upgrades and improvements and the outages were not intended to be end user visible. They’re going to keep a closer eye on things, while they finish the upgrades. The good news...
The folks at The Daily Show, who brought us the wonderful term “High Volume Email Deployer” so very long ago, are once again leading the way in new unsubscribe technology. Unsubscribe by television. Meanwhile, the folks at The Daily Mash have a different unsubscribe suggestion. MEMBERSHIP of networking website LinkedIn can only be terminated by destroying its corporate headquarters...
The acquisition of email service providers continues. Last week Deluxe (yes, the check printing people) acquired Vertical Response. This appears to be positioning themselves to improve their collection of business services to include email marketing.
I’ve had a couple folks come to me recently for help troubleshooting SPF failures. The error messages said the SPF record was invalid, but by all checks it was valid. Eventually, we tracked the issue down to how many include files were in the SPF record. The SPF specification specifically limits the number of lookups that can happen during a SPF check. SPF implementations MUST limit the...
I’m working on a blog post about the new Gmail tabbed inbox and the messages Gmail is inserting into the promotions tab. The messages aren’t showing up on most of my accounts, so I logged into an infrequently used account of mine. Ads are there, I got my screenshots and some data about the behaviour of the messages. So far so good. I also discovered that at least two other women are...
Yahoo announced a few weeks ago it would be releasing account names back into the general pool. This, understandably, caused a lot of concern among marketers about how this would affect email delivery at Yahoo. I had the opportunity to talk with a Yahoo employee last week, and ask some questions about how this might affect delivery. Q: How many email addresses are affected? Yahoo is not providing...
A few months ago, Ken Magill asked marketers, including the folks at Only Influencers to provide him with questions to pass along to Spamhaus. Spamhaus answered the first set in March, but then were hit with the Stophaus attack and put answering further questions on hold. Last week, they provided a second set of answers and this week they provided a third. Nothing in there is surprising, but...
ICANN have signed agreements for four new top level domains, all internationalized domains from the 2o12 applications for new TLDs. They are شبكة (“network” or maybe “web” in arabic), 游戏 (“game” in chinese), онлайн and сайт (“online” and “website” in russian). It’ll take a while for the registries to ramp up their infrastructure...
Karl Murray wrote a great set of recommendations for growing an email marketing list. I really can’t think of anything I would have said differently. Touching customers and getting contact information from them is great, but there are situations where this gets bad addresses. Too many bad addresses can impact delivery. So how do you grow your list without falling into a delivery trap? The...
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