Sanford Wallace has been sentenced to 2 years in jail by the US District court in San Jose for contempt of court and electronic mail fraud. Sanford has been around for more than 2 decades. He is one of the spammers that drove me to learn how to read headers and report spam back in the late nineties. Sanford has been in and out of courts and the news almost as long as he’s been spamming...
About that permission thing
I wrote a few days ago about permission and how it was the key to getting into the inbox. It’s another one of those “necessary but not sufficient” parts of delivery. There are, however, a lot of companies who are using email without the recipient permission. These companies often contact me to help them solve their delivery problems. Often these are new companies who are trying...
M3AAWG in Philly This Week
Today marks the training day for M3AAWG 37 in Philly. With all the traveling and speaking I’ve been doing lately we’re not going to be there. So no tweeting from me about the conference. We’ve been attending various M3AAWG meetings since way early on – 2004? 2005? in San Diego. The organization has grown and matured and really come a long way since the early days. One of...
GOP candidate not doing email well
According to Adage and Return Path, Donald Trump’s mail campaign is not one to write home about. He’s not asking for donations and has a high rate of spam complaints.
Ask Laura: Why is my video email blocked?
Dear Laura, We have a real estate client who has asked us to include short video previews of houses in their weekly newsletters to prospective buyers. The videos are great — informative, well-produced, and they definitely meet your definition of wanted email, as subscribers have been asking for this content for a long time. Unfortunately, we are learning that many email service providers...
Gmail / Apps authentication issues
I’ve seen several reports of unexpected rejections for unauthenticated email to Google over IPv6 today. Unauthenticated mail over IPv6 is a bad idea, but Google usually spam folders it rather than rejecting it. The Gmail status dashboard is reporting an issue “Some messages sent to consumer Gmail accounts are being rejected due to authentication enforcement” so something...
Permission: Let’s Talk Facts
I’ve commented in the past about how I can usually tell when an ISP makes filtering changes because all my calls relate to that ISP. The more recent contender is Gmail. They made changes a few months ago and a lot of folks are struggling to reach the inbox now. What I’m seeing, working with clients, is that there are two critical pieces to getting to the gmail inbox: permission and...
Who owns the inbox
One of the questions asked of my panel during Connections 16 last month was who owns the inbox. My point of view is that the end user owns the inbox, with a few minor exceptions. For instance, in the case of a business, the business owns the inbox. With email marketing, the marketing is entering a personal space as an invited guest. Senders need to be cognizant of this to continue having access...
Looking forward in email
Len Shneyder writes about what we can expect to see in the near future email landscape.
Creating emails
Email is, still, primarily a written medium. This means that good copywriting is crucial. Today I opened up an email and the pre-header says: Laura, should have get your Naturals Sample Bag.*Web Version Wait. What? Maybe they mean “should have got”? But that’s implying they’re sending out free sample bags to everyone. That can’t be right. But I can’t tell...