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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...

Verizon Media Postmaster Site

Marcel brought up in the comments that Verizon Media has a postmaster site. The ex-AOL and Yahoo folks have done a great job providing information for senders to help troubleshoot their mail. There is a direct link to receive sender support. As I’ve said before, you should always use the form when looking for sender support. Thanks to all the VM folks who have worked so hard to get a new...

AOL postmaster site *poof*

We knew this day would come, but somehow it doesn’t make it any easier. The AOL postmaster site is gone. Raise a toast tonight to all the people who created and maintained the site for the last decade and a half. Raise a toast tonight to the email industry that was. Thanks to all the AOL folks throughout the years that poured so much into making email better for their customers and the rest...

Email verification vendor leaking marketer data

I’ve been waiting for this to happen. An email verification vendor has left their database of 800 million email addresses along with detailed individual data. unprotected on the internet. Bob Diachenko reported the discovery yesterday on his blog. Wired also ran an article (An Email Marketing Company Left 809 Million Records Exposed Online) based on his findings. Padlock on a keyboard with...

Audiences, targeting and signups

A few weeks ago we closed on our new house in Dublin. This weekend we’re going to one of those ‘home shows’ where people try and sell you all sorts of things for your home. We know there are some things we want to do with the house so we’re headed out to the convention centre this weekend. Tickets are “free” but they ask for contact information, including an...

SenderID is dead

A question came up on the email geeks slack channel (Join Here) about SenderID. They recently had a customer ask for SenderID authentication. We’ve written about it a few times: (Hotmail moves to SPF Authentication and Until it stops moving) but we’ve not actually stated the reasons why in a post. SenderID was basically SPF version 2. It tried to use the same mechanism as SPF to...

Economics of spam

There was a discussion on Slack about the economics of email. It’s probably not a surprise that I have opinions (Who owns the inbox? Ownership of the Inbox). There was a discussion about this that was useful enough I’d share it. Participants: Laura: Laura Atkins (me!)Steve: Steve Atkins (other half of WttW)Matt V: Director Privacy @ 250ok Laura: Direct mail to your home the owner...

It’s not marketing, it’s spam

There are times when I hesitate to call what marketers do “spam.” I can use the euphemisms with the best of ’em. “Cold emails” “Targeted Marketing” “B2B marketing.” I’ll say it here and now: cold emails are spam. Sales people who are sending enough email that they require automation to actually send the mail are spamming. Look at this...

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