Recent Posts

Back at it

Back at the office after traveling to visit a bunch of our US friends recently. A lot of news, both in and out of the email space, happened while we were gone. The biggest stories are outside the email space and I will admit to following the coronavirus news probably closer than I should. (My graduate work was done across the hall from one of the major avian epidemic monitoring labs. This is the kind of thing we discussed at lunch and over beers.)

What is FCrDNS and why do we care

It’s been a light blogging month. We’ve been dancing around getting the final plans, financing, and contractors set up for the work we’re doing on the Dublin house and then heading off for our first actual vacation in almost 5 years. But, I wrote half of this answering a question on mailop, so I may as well polish and publish.

The key to improving deliverability

According to the UK DMA, marketers report improvements in deliverability after GDPR went into effect.

Address verification doesn’t fix any real problem

Would you trust an address verification company that used twitter spam to advertise their product?

Stop obsessing about open rates

In 2020:

250OK says open rates were much lower than ESPs report.
The Only Influencers list hosts a discussion about the value and use of open rates.
A potential client contacts me asking if I can get their open rates to a certain percentage.
A client shows me evidence of 100% inboxing but wants to improve their open rate.
An industry group runs sessions at multiple meetings discussing how inaccurate open rates are.

The industry needs to stop obsessing over open rates.

The OSI Seven Layer Model

In the 1970s, while the early drafts of the Internet were being developed, a competing model for networking was being put together by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization).

Some Microsoft thoughts

Right at the end of January, Microsoft appears to have made couple of changes to how they’re handling authentication. The interesting piece of this is that, in both cases, Microsoft is taking authentication protocols and using them in ways that are slightly outside the spec, but are logical extensions of the spec.

Your first M3AAWG meeting

It’s that time of year again where nearly all my client calls involve the question, “are you going to be at M3AAWG SF?” Up until last year, the answer was always yes. But now it’s not a brief drive up the peninsula and a BART ride into the city, it’s a transatlantic plane flight.

When opens hurt reputation

Podia has scraped the Word to the Wise blog and I’m currently receiving an ongoing drip campaign from them absolutely begging me to mention them in my blog post on cold emails.

Using Reply-To:

Yesterday I learned that some ESPs don’t support the reply to: address. I asked around to discover which ESPs did. Here’s what I learned.