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Explicit consent

I’m working on a blog post about correlation and causation and how cleaning a list doesn’t make it opt-in and permission isn’t actually as outdated as many think and is still important when it comes to delivery. Today is a hard-to-word day, so I headed over to twitter. Only to find someone in my personal network re-tweeted this: Don't add professional contacts to newsletter...

Delivery is not dependent on authentication

All too often folks come to me with delivery problems and lead off with all of the things they’ve done to send mail right. They assure me they’re using SPF and DKIM and DMARC and they can’t understand why things are bad. There is this pervasive belief that if you do all the technical things right then you will reach the inbox. Getting the technical bits right is an important...

The many meanings of opt-in

An email address was entered into our website An email address was associated with a purchase on our website. We have a relationship with a 3rd party that shares email addresses with us. We have a cookie on a web browser that visited out website and we sent an email to the address associated with that cookie. We both went to the same conference and the attendee list was given to every exhibitor...

Email filters and small sends

Have you heard about the Baader-Meinhoff effect? The Baader-Meinhof effect, also known as frequency illusion, is the illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias). Baader–Meinhof effect at Wikipedia There has to...

Shared environments

In the email system there are all sorts of different belief systems. One contingent will have you believe that IP reputation is the be all and end all of delivery. Get a decent IP reputation, and the clouds will part, angels will sing and your mail will reach the inbox. This group of folks often recommends every sender should have their own dedicated IP address. Anything less is just admitting...

Phishing and authentication

This morning I got a rather suspicious message from a colleague on LinkedIn. I asked around and it seems other folks got the same message and were equally confused. I didn’t click the link because that seemed risky. A few hours later one of the folks I had talked to mentioned that the person’s entire profile was gone. Likewise, the above message disappeared from my messages tab...

New office

We successfully worked out of a well fitted out home office for years. But part of the move to Dublin was about changing our lifestyle. Last week we took possession of our new office and today our new monitors arrived. Eventually we’ll move into our new house and install our other set of monitors, currently still in storage at the docks. It’s nice to see real progress, though. The...

Dead addresses tell us things

There was confirmation this week that the increase in “user unknown” messages from Yahoo is actually Yahoo cleaning out abandoned accounts. At the same time a Yahoo is sending out notifications to folks to log into mail. The first thing every sender should do is remove all these Yahoo addresses from their lists. They’re done, kaput. Gone. There are some other things worth doing...

Email news today

Ironport have rolled out an update to their rule engine which has a bug causing mail problems. According to discussion on the mailop list, the new rule engine is folding the header with a line feed (LF) rather than a carriage return (CRLF). This is breaking things, including DKIM signatures. Ironport is aware of the issue. I expect an updated rollout shortly. AOL migrated the last few users onto...

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