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If I can't tell, it's spam

Judging by the amount of B2B spams I’ve gotten this past week, a number of businesses got bright, shiny new email programs for Christmas. “Like to set up a call with you…” “Just need 10 minutes of your time to explore…” “Love to jump on a call and tell you about our product…” That’s just the mail that comes into my personal address...

Sharing access to Google Postmaster Tools

As a delivery consultant, I always ask clients to share their Google postmaster reports with me. As Gmail is one of the bigger delivery challenges for a lot of senders, having access to the postmaster tools helps tease out issues. I had some issues earlier this week getting access to tools and so brought up a conversation on one of the delivery lists. The nice folks there helped me get it solved...

December 2016: The Month in Email

Happy New Year! We’re looking forward to some interesting new projects this year, both for our clients and for Word to the Wise. Stay tuned! December was a slow month for blogging, with everything going on. But we’re back on the horse now and ready to blog for 2017. List and subscription management continue to be hot topics, especially in the wake of the listbombing attacks earlier this...

Happy New Year!

Well, we mostly survived 2016. A year ago I was making predictions about how 2016 would be the year of email security. I was thinking of things like TLS and authentication and access to the inbox. It wasn’t out of the question, Gmail said they’d be turning on p=reject sometime mid-year. They also were suggesting that they would be putting more value on messages that aligned, even in...

It's that time of year

I’m winding down blogging through the next week or so. I have a lot to say and blog about in the coming year, but I don’t think I’m alone in saying good bye and good riddance to 2016. Happy Holidays to everyone, whatever events you may celebrate. I have to admit, it doesn’t feel very holiday around here. Part of that is we cut the cord a few months ago and we’ve not...

Poor delivery at Gmail but no where else

I’ve mentioned before that I can often tell what ISP is making filter changes by what my calls are about. The last few weeks it’s been Gmail where folks are struggling to get to the inbox. One of the things most clients and potential clients have mentioned is that they’re not having any problems at the other major ISPs. Gmail’s filters are probably the most extensive and...

Listbombing Webinar

Earlier this week I gave a webinar hosted by the EEC and the DMA discussing the listbombing problem. They will be making the recording available later this week and I will link to it then. I wish I could say the issue was done and over with and that it was something we don’t have to worry about any longer. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case. Attacks are ongoing. Many of them are...

Is your website up? Are you sure?

“What would you do for 25% more sales?” It’s panicked gift-buying season, and I got mail this morning from Boutique Academia, part of their final push before Christmas. They’re hoping for some Christmas sales in the next three days. They do make some lovely jewelry – ask Laura about her necklace some time – so I clicked on their mail. That’s not good. I...

DKIM Canonicalization – or – why Microsoft breaks your mail

One of these things is just like the other Canonicalization is about comparing things to see if they’re the same. Sometimes you want to do a “fuzzy” comparison, to see if two things are interchangeable for your purposes, even if they’re not exactly identical. As a concrete example, these two email addresses: (Steve) steve@wordtothewise.com “Also Steve”...

Ask Laura: Should we confirm unsubscribes?

Dear Laura, We have some questions about best practices for unsubscribes. Our ESP uses the List-Unsubscribe header by default on every email. I’m not familiar with this, and I have some questions for you. First, do you think this is a good idea? Should we always use it, or just for certain emails? Should we use the mailto:link or link to a web site to unsubscribe? We were also asked about double...

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