November 22, 2017
Pie
22November
November 21, 2017
Happy Thanksgiving
21November
November 20, 2017
Busiest email time of the year
20November
Everyone ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns? I know many retailers are already mailing, my inbox is exploding with offers. For me, this is often a quiet time of the year. As a strategist, most of my worked happened months ago. Now, it’s time for execution. I wish everyone a successful week of mailing. May your deliverability be high. May your subject lines be correct. May...
November 17, 2017
Catchall domains
17November
Catchall domains accept any mail to any email address at that domain. They were quite common, particularly at smaller domains, a long time ago. For various reasons, most of them having to do with spammers, they’re less common now. Most folks think catchall domains are only used for spamtraps. As a consequence, many of the address verification tools will filter out, or recommend filtering...
November 16, 2017
SendGrid IPO
16November
Congrats to the folks at SendGrid for raising over 130 million in their IPO yesterday. Also, cool stock symbol, bro.
November 15, 2017
Spike in Yahoo error codes
15November
A number of people have mentioned over the last couple weeks that they’re seeing a spike in Yahoo rejecting mail with
554 delivery error: dd Requested mail action aborted
Discussions on various mailing lists indicate these messages are related to inactive accounts. Addresses that bounce at Yahoo with these codes should be handled as inactive addresses and removed from future mailings.
November 13, 2017
Permission and B2B spam
13November
Two of the very first posts I wrote on the blog were about permission (part 1, part 2). Re-reading those posts is interesting. Experience has taught me that recipients are much more forgiving of implicit opt-in than that post implies. The chance in recipient expectations doesn’t mean, however, that permission isn’t important or required. In fact, The Verge reported on a chatbot that...
November 10, 2017
10November
Today is one of those days I just want to argue with all the subject headers of the marketing email I get.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) November 10, 2017
November 9, 2017
Subscription bombing and abuse prevention
09November
A few weeks ago ProPublica was the victim of a subscription bomb attack. Julia Angwin found my blog post on the subject and contacted me to talk about the post. We spent an hour or so on the phone and I shared some of the information we had on the problem. Julie told me she was interested in investigating this further problem further. Today, ProPublica published Cheap Tricks: the Low Cost of...
November 8, 2017
Interacting in professional fora
08November
There are a bunch of online communities – mailing lists, Slack channels, etc. – where “people who do email” interact. Some of them are open to anyone to subscribe, some of them are semi-private and require an invitation, others are closed and only available by invitation and yet others are associated with trade associations and only open to their members. Many of them...
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