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Happy 2018

This is the time of year when everyone starts posting their predictions for the coming year. Despite over a decade of blogging and close to 2500 blog posts, I have’t consistently written prediction articles here. Many years I don’t see big changes on the horizon, so there’s not a lot to comment on. Incremental changes are status quo, nothing earth shattering there. But I’ve been thinking about what might be on the horizon in 2018 and how that will affect email marketing.

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Authentication is about Identity, not Virtue

I just got some mail claiming to be from “Bank of America <secure@bofasecure.com>”.
It passes SPF:

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Organizational Domain

We often want to know whether two hostnames are controlled by the same person, or not.

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November 2017: The Month in Email

We’re in the thick of the busiest time of the year for email. It’s been so busy, in fact, that we’ve seen some slowdowns and delivery issues across the email universe. It may be worth thinking about alternate strategies for end of year promotions beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
I was delighted to chat with Julia Angwin for her ProPublica piece on subscription bombing and abuse prevention. Her piece is a good introduction to the topic, and very much worth reading.
ICYMI, I did a rough analysis of the data from our survey on Google Postmaster Tools. Stay tuned for more insights when I have a moment to explore this further.

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Email Marketing Trends from Freshmail

[#INFOGRAPHIC] Email marketing trends 2018


It’s always an honor to be asked to provide quotes and thoughts with experts in the field. Sometimes the day to day gives me tunnel vision, but things like this give me the opportunity to think more globally. Hands down, though, the best part is seeing the final product and hearing what other folks have to say.
Go check out the full infographic.

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About that DMARC "exploit"

A security researcher has identified a rendering flaw that allows for “perfect” phishing emails. From his website:

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Deliverability is critical for marketing

It is increasingly clear that successful email marketing programs measure and emphasize deliverability. No longer is deliverability the crisis management team called when everything breaks. They’re part and parcel of an effective email marketing team.
Today I watched a bit of the EIS livestream where acquisition marketers were discussing their processes. Everyone of them talked about things that are critical for deliverability as core to their business.

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Microsoft MXs changed over

Today on MailOp it was announced that the migration of Microsoft freemail domains to the office 365 backend. Over the next week the mx*.hotmail.com mail servers will stop working. Check your settings, folks, and make sure you’re correctly querying DNS before sending.

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Vodafone New Zealand: sorta shutting down

Vodafone NZ is shutting down mail handling for the following domains as of today, Nov 30, 2017.

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Not fooling anyone…

A question came up on the Women of Email Facebook page about sending cold B2B emails. This is one of those areas I have strong opinions about, mostly because I am so tired of getting deceptive and unending messages from folks.
Realistically, cold emailing isn’t going to stop just because recipients hate receiving it. We haven’t wiped out spam in 20+ years, we’re not going to manage it for this one tiny piece. But I do think there are things senders can do to minimize the amount of frustration their spam creates.

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