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Just some stuff going on around email that probably merit a mention but not a whole blog post. Next Tuesday at 1 eastern I’ll be giving a webinar on the subscription bombing and discussing what companies can do to mitigate the problem. Google is working on new “invisible” captchas, that separate out humans from bots without humans having to do anything. EmailonAcid created an...

Outreach or spam?

This showed up in my mailbox earlier today: The tweet in question From Crunchbase: “Pluck is an email prospecting tool that gives you the email addresses of the people tweeting about subjects related to your business.” Prospecting: another name for spamming. Look, I know that you want to sell you’re newest, greatest product to the world. But just because I tweet something with a...

November 2016: The Month In Email

Happy December! Between #blackfriday, #cybermonday & #givingtuesday, pretty much everyone in the US has just survived a week of email from every brand and organization they’ve ever interacted with. Phew. Is this still the best strategy for most senders? Maybe. But it’s always important to be adaptable and continue to evaluate and evolve your strategy as you move through the year. As always, I...

Google accounts breached

Over 1 million Google accounts breached by Android malware. There are some folks I know who really can’t understand why I stick with Apple over Android. The above issue is a big one. Doing what we do, security is a major consideration. I don’t need my accounts, or other accounts I have access to, compromised. It’s not that Apple is 100% compromise proof, but there are more...

Oracle buys Dyn

Last week Oracle announced they were buying Dyn. Interesting acquisition, but fills a spot in Oracle’s playbook to provide infrastructure.
None of the press releases I’ve seen about the acquisition mentions the Dyn email service platform. Oracle has at least two email platforms already (Eloqua and Responsys). It will be interesting to see what happens with email.

DNSBLs, wildcards and domain expiration

Last week the megarbl.net domain name expired. Normally this would have no affect on anyone, but their domain registrar put in a wildcard DNS entry. Because of how DNSBLs work, this had the effect of causing every IP to be listed on the blocklist. The domain is now active and the listings due to the DNS wildcard are removed. How does a domain expiration lead to a DNSBL listing the whole internet...

Don't forget the strategy

We’re two days out from the beginning of the Holiday Shopping Season here in the US. Three days out from one of the biggest retail shopping days of the year in the US. 5 days out from one of the biggest online shopping days of the year. I’m sure everyone has their mail campaigns planned. Most of the messages are finished, just waiting for a tweak or the exact right image. The...

It depends… no more

The two most hated words in deliverability. Many people ask general questions about deliverability and most experts, including myself, answer, “It depends.” There are a lot of problems with this answer. The biggest problem is that it’s led to the impression that there are no real answers about deliverability. That because we can’t answer hypothetical questions we are...

Recipients and the Spam Button

Earlier this week Litmus and Fluent hosted a webinar title “Adapting to Consumers’ New Definition of Spam.” This had a number of fascinating facts about email marketing, many of which should reassure folks. Litmus has a blog post up highlighting some of the findings specific to millennials and email. Good news is millennials like getting mail from brands and interact with them...

Targeted marketing done badly

There was quite a bit of content I cut out on my rant about parasites in the email ecosystem earlier this week. I had whole section on people who ask to connect on LinkedIn and then immediately send a pitch or scrape your address and add it to their marketing automation software and start spamming. Generally, the only reason I will drop someone off LinkedIn is because they do this. Today, one of...

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