Recent Posts

CAN-SPAM Again

• steve
• Apr 24, 2019

• Legal

The US CAN-SPAM act is the primary US legislation covering commercial email. It’s been around since 2003, but I still see a steady stream of questions about it, and the folkloric answers to some of them are all over the place.

When marketing automation goes bad

• laura
• Apr 22, 2019

• Industry

Friday I attempted to make a purchase online. I go through the selection and checkout process … up through the payment choices. When I pick pay by credit card I get an error message that says “credit card expiration date wrong.” All very strange because I’ve not put in a credit card number or expiration date.

Question of the day

• laura
• Apr 18, 2019

• Uncategorized

Is 10,000 emails sent a few times a week a high enough volume to improve a Gmail reputation?

Gmail suddenly puts mail in the bulk folder

• laura
• Apr 16, 2019

• Delivery Improvement

One of the delivery challenges that regularly comes up in various delivery discussion spaces is the “Gmail suddenly put my mail in spam.” From my perspective, there is rarely a “suddenly” about Gmail’s decision making process.

TLS and Gmail delivery

• laura
• Apr 11, 2019

• Industry

I’m seeing some questions about TLS and Gmail. Folks are seeing a correlation between sending without TLS and the mail going to bulk.

Low bounce rates don’t mean a list is good

• laura
• Apr 9, 2019

• Best Practices

Many people believe that if they remove non-existent addresses from their mailing lists that their lists will make it to the inbox without a problem. In fact, an entire industry has grown up around the idea that sending mail to valid addresses can never be spam. This isn’t true, of course, spammers use many of the same techniques legitimate mailers do to clean their lists.

Explicit consent

• laura
• Apr 8, 2019

• Industry

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post about correlation and causation and how cleaning a list doesn’t make it opt-in and permission isn’t actually as outdated as many think and is still important when it comes to delivery.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:

Delivery is not dependent on authentication

• laura
• Apr 4, 2019

• Best Practices

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.

The many meanings of opt-in

• laura
• Apr 3, 2019

• Industry

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Email filters and small sends

• laura
• Apr 1, 2019

• Industry

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 be an corollary for email. For instance, over the last week or so I’ve gotten an influx of questions about how to fix delivery for one to one email. Some have been from clients “Oh, while we’re at it… this happened.” Others have been from groups I’m associated with “I sent this message and it ended up in spam.”