In the early years of the spam problem, a common piece of advice was to never unsubscribe. At the time, this made a lot of sense. Multiple anti-spammers documented spammers harvesting addresses from unsubscribe forms. This activity tapered off around 2000 or so, although the myth persisted for much longer. These days, there isn’t much harm in unsubscribing. I even spent a full month...
People throughout the industry are reporting phishing notices in a lot of mail going through Microsoft properties this morning. I even got one in an email from one of my clients earlier today Multiple people have talked to employees inside Microsoft, and I suspect their customers have been blowing up support about this. I know they’re aware, I suspect they’re frantically working on a...
A lot of email providers are rolling out changes to their systems. Some of these changes are so they will comply with GDPR. But, in other cases, the changes appear coincidental with GDPR coming into effect. It seems, finally, some attention is being paid to the mail client. Over the last few years the webmail providers have tried to upgrade their interface. Many of the upgrades are about...
A number of companies in the email industry have been working on a way to better identify authenticated emails to users. One proposal is Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI). A couple weeks ago, Agari announced a pilot program with some brands and a number of major consumer mail providers. These logos should be available in the Yahoo interface now and will be rolling out at other...
One thing I really like about going to conferences is they’re often one of the few times I get to sit and think about the bigger email picture. Hearing other people talk about their marketing experiences, their email experiences, and their blocking experiences usually triggers big picture style thoughts. Earlier this week I was at Activate18, hosted by Iterable. The sessions I attended were...
Vala from Salesforce shared this infographic this morning.
(from Statista)
It estimates that in one minute on the 2017 Internet there were 25,000 tweets, 3.8 million google searches, 29 million SMS messages and 156 million emails sent.
Email is still a pretty vibrant messaging channel.
AOL has disabled the IP reputation check and the rDNS lookup on their postmaster pages. Given AOL isn’t handling the first mail hop any longer, this makes perfect sense. They simply don’t have the kind of data they did when they were handling mail directly from the sender MTA. There’s no information, yet, on whether or not that functionality will be added / replicated over at...
Today I was chatting with a potential client who is in the middle of a frustrating warmup at Gmail. They’re doing absolutely the right things, it’s just taking longer than anyone wants. That’s kinda how it is with Gmail, while their algorithm can adapt quickly to changes. Sometimes, like when you’re warming up or trying to change a bad reputation, it can take 3 – 4...
I got a piece of B2B spam last week that showed in several different ways why spam isn’t going away any time soon. Systemic problems dealing with abuse at scale at Google. Ethics problems at Cloudflare. Problems dealing with abuse at scale at Amazon. Cultural problems in India, several times over. Buckle up. The spam content The spam email itself looks pretty much like any business email...
The Yahoo bounce problem has been resolved. There were erroneous ‘554: this user does not have a yahoo.com account’ between March 14 and March 16. If you attempted to send mail and received this bounce during that time you can reactivate the address in your database. Most ESPs should be able to help you with this. Moving forward, though, these bounces are valid and addresses should be...
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