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January 10, 2013

Frequency and Relevance: Insight from Actual Recipients

By steve

4 Min read

5 comments

10January

Last night, the email practices of Facebook, Verizon and LinkedIn sparked something of a discussion on IRC. Rather than trying to summarize into a business language friendly post I thought I’d share the whole thing. Warning: Includes strong language and graphic descriptions of human on salesman violence.   Huey: I may have just arrived at a Laura guest blog post. Huey: About...

January 9, 2013

More on the Yahoo exploit

By laura

1 Min read

1 comment

09January

Exacttarget’s Carlo Catajan talks about the Yahoo exploit. My own mailbox seems to indicate this hole is closed.

January 7, 2013

Links for 1/7

By laura

2 Min read

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07January

Chris K. at Bronto blogs about in-store address collection and delivery issues. Chris is right, the Spamhaus issue isn’t going away any time soon. And companies collecting addresses in store / at point of sale really need to figure out how to make sure that their data capture is accurate. That means addressing everything from customers giving the wrong address to typos and other...

January 4, 2013

Canada publishes updated proposed regulations for CASL

By laura

1 Min read

1 comment

04January

Based on initial feedback collected in 2011, updated regulations for CASL have been published by the Industry Canada. Interested stakeholders have until February 4, 2013 to comment on the proposed regulations.
Edit: to identify correct Canadian Govt Agency (Thanks, Neil!)

January 4, 2013

Increasing engagement for delivery?

By laura

4 Min read

3 comments

I’ve talked a lot about engagement here over the years and how increasing engagement can increase inbox delivery. But does driving engagement always improve delivery? Take LinkedIn as an example. LinkedIn has started to pop-up a link when users log in. This popup suggests that the user endorse a connection for a particular skill. When the user clicks on the popup, an email is sent to the...

January 2, 2013

Images in the subject line

By steve

2 Min read

2 comments

02January

I’ve seen this trick used by a few senders recently, with varying effectiveness. Where do they get these pictures? While you can scatter any images you like across the body of your message, the subject line is limited to just text. But “text” is more than just “a, b, c” – using RFC 2047 encoding you can use any character you like, including many tiny pictures...

December 27, 2012

Meaningless metrics

By laura

2 Min read

2 comments

27December

I’ve been having some conversations with fellow delivery folks about metrics and delivery and bad practices. Sometimes, a sender will have what appear to be good metrics, but really aren’t getting them through any good practices. They’re managing to avoid the clear indicators of bad practices (complaints, SBL listings, blocks, etc), but only because the metrics aren’t good...

December 26, 2012

Hotmail issues

By laura

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26December

A number of people, both at ESPs and on the mailops mailing list, are reporting problems at Hotmail. The most common reports are senders getting Site hotmail.com (65.55.92.152) said in response to MAIL FROM (452 Out of memory) during the SMTP session. There isn’t much senders can do about this. Hotmail is going to have to fix their resource issue. This may be limited to certain mail...

December 19, 2012

Winding down for the holidays

By laura

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19December

I’m frantically trying to get a couple client projects finished before next week so blogging will probably be light until the New Year.

December 18, 2012

Phones part of SMS botnet

By laura

1 Min read

6 comments

18December

Spammers have been moving into the phone market for a long time. Just recently security firms have discovered an Android  botnet. This botnet sends viruses over SMS, and when a link in the SMS is clicked, the phone is infected with the virus which then sends more SMS. The technology for blocking and reporting SMS spam is comparable to email blocking technology 10 or 12 years ago. There just...