I’ve mentioned multiple times before that I really don’t like using personal contacts until and unless the published or official channels fail. I don’t hold this opinion just about resolving delivery issues, but also use official channels when reporting spam to one of my addresses or spam traps. My usual complaints contain a plain text copy of the mail, including full headers...
I’ve been following Richard the Cat on Twitter for a while. It’s the story of a family and their trials and tribulations with their yard as told by their cat. The twitter feed (and Richard’s tumblr) are a product of the Home Depot marketing department. And it’s great. Richard has awesome comments on his humans and their struggle to create a happy yard. The tweets are low...
One of the biggest arguments against confirmation is that it’s too hard and that there is too much drop off from subscribers. In other words, recipients don’t want to confirm because it’s too much work on their part. I don’t actually think it’s too much work for recipients. In fact, when a sender has something the recipient wants then they will confirm. A couple...
My twitter feeds exploded with discussion and comments and retweets about the explosions in Boston this afternoon. One of my friends even commented, “It’s days like today when you can tell who is scheduling tweets.” If you are scheduling tweets it’s really important to have someone around to monitor local, national or international events and stop those tweets before your...
For a while, Yahoo was giving preferential “images always on” treatment to Return Path Certified senders. The tricky part of this was the senders had to register a DKIM selector key with Yahoo. I had a lot of (somewhat rude) things to say about this particular design decision. Over the last few months, a number of senders have complained about being unable to update their selector...
The idea of confirming permission to send mail to an email address gets a lot of bad press among many marketers. It seems that every few weeks some new person decides that they’re going to write an article or a whitepaper or a blog and destroy the idea behind confirming an email address. And, of course, that triggers a bunch of people to publish rebuttal articles and blog posts. I’m...
Microsoft has a new TV ad showing how trivial it is to remove unwanted email from the inbox. Various busy people use the “sweep” and “delete” functions to clean up mail. The commercial even have a segment counting up the hundreds of emails deleted. This tells me a few things. Email isn’t dead. Major companies are still investing in email products and creating tools...
When you look up a host name, a mailserver or anything else there are three types of reply you can get. The way they’re described varies from tool to tool, but they’re most commonly referred to using the messages dig returns – NXDOMAIN, NOERROR and SERVFAIL. NXDOMAIN is the simplest – it means that there’s no DNS record that matches your query (or any other query for...
I’ve been seeing reports over the last few days about an increase in bounces at Yahoo. Reliable people are telling me they’re seeing some increase in “invalid user” bounces. You may remember Yahoo announced an overhaul of their mail product back in December. Reliable sources tell me that this is more than just interface revamp. In the back end, Yahoo! is removing older...
The Chicago Sun Times announced earlier today that Roger Ebert passed away today. Mr. Ebert was a legendary film critic, who hosted multiple shows over the last few decades. His influence wasn’t just in the film arena, though. Mr. Ebert was an active participant online. In fact it was Roger Ebert, in 1996 at the Conference of World Affairs in Boulder Colorado, that coined “The Boulder...
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