Recent Posts

Time for Email Innovations!

After a great experience in Atlanta last week, with the Salesforce and Mailchimp folks, I’m heading off again today. This time it’s Las Vegas for the Email Innovations conference hosted by the Only Influencers group.
My talk is coming together nicely. It’s been a bit of a challenge to try and give enough detail to make sense while not overwhelming with technobabble. There were times when I was all

Thankfully I have some great folks around who talked me down and reminded me that there wasn’t a test and I could gloss over some of the details and still make sense. If you want a preview of part of my talk, check out my blogpost from last week at Only Influencers. Understanding the technical: authentication.
Hope to see you there! My talk is in the Education track after lunch on Thursday.

Comcast having a bad day

Comcast announced this morning that they’re having problems receiving mail and their customers are seeing significant delays.

We are currently experience an issue which is causing a significant delay in receiving email. This is not a good thing and we are very aware of the problem and are working hard to restore it.
Technical description for those who are interested:
A problem on a couple of the network switches caused our blob storage to get into a bad state. Lots of peering errors etc, this coupled with a bug in the blob storage vendors software is prolonging resolution. We have an incident bridge going with the team and the developers.
Official notice on Xfinity Forums

Your purchased list … is spam.

This morning I got spam from someone selling email addresses. The mail starts:

Hotmail having a bad day

Hotmail seems to be having a bad day, responding to a lot of delivery attempts with “554 Transaction failed” responses.
It’s not you, it’s them. They’re aware of the issue.

Don't just follow the HOWTO

There are so many moving parts to ensure good email deliverability. Email marketers need to know marketing, they need to know email and they need to know design. The technical bits of email can be a challenge to learn, and many folks who write tutorials and How-Tos write them for a different audience than marketers.
One of the things I’m trying to do is demystify the technical end of email for marketers. Today I talked about authentication in the Only Influencers newsletter. Check it out!
Understanding the technical: Authentication
Authentication in general

Deliverability session at Connections 2016

If you’re at Connections 2016 stop by our session at 3:00 in the Sidney Marcus Auditorium. Bring your pressing deliverability questions.

Ask Laura: Confused about CAN SPAM

Phone call of the week

I received a message on our 800 number. “This is Mark from a-website.example. Your customers are complaining to me that they are not getting my mail. And you’re blocking mail from me. Explain this to me!”

I called him back and left a message: “I think you’re confused and I probably can’t help you.”
A few minutes later, Mark returns my call.
L: Hi, this is laura.
M: Who are you? You called me, you must be from Clearwire!
L: No, I’m not with Clearwire, I’m with WttW.
M: Then why is your phone number on the Clearwire website?
L: I don’t know, but this isn’t Clearwire. The Clearwire website is redirecting to Sprint. They got bought out a while ago.
M: Redirecting to Sprint? What does that mean? Your phone number is on Clearwire’s website. You must be with Clearwire.
L: No, really, I’m not.
M: Why is your phone number on their website?
L: I don’t know. But this is not Clearwire. (I start searching the blog because I remember some post somewhere about Clearwire.)
M: Well, who are you?
L: I run a delivery consulting firm. Is it possible you found my website and the blog post that says all clearwire.net addresses are being discontinued April 15, 2015?
M: They’re gone?
L: Yes, for more than a year now.
M: Oh.
scene
That blog post is the #1 google hit if you search for clearwire.net.

Changes coming to Verizon email

Last year Verizon bought AOL. As part of that merger some @verizon.net email is being migrated to the AOL backend. FAQs published by Verizon say this change is only affecting users in FL, TX and CA. Users will still have @verizon.net addresses but the backend and filtering will be managed by AOL.
This shouldn’t have a huge impact on commercial senders. However, one thing I did notice while reading through the FAQ is this:

April 2016: The Month in Email

We are finishing up another busy month at WttW. April was a little nutty with network glitches, server crashes, cat woes, and other disruptions, but hopefully that’s all behind us as we head into May. I’ll be very busy in May as well, speaking at Salesforce Connections in Atlanta and the Email Innovation Summit in Las Vegas. Please come say hello if you’re attending either of these great events.

Speaking of great events, I participated in two panels at EEC16 last month. We had a lot of great audience participation, and I met many wonderful colleagues. I wrote up some more thoughts about the conference here. I also had a nice conversation with the folks over at Podbox, and they’ve posted my interview on their site.
In the Podbox interview, as always, I talked about sending mail people want to receive. It always makes me roll my eyes a bit when I see articles with titles like “5 Simple Ways to Reach the Inbox”, so I wrote a bit about that here. In addition to sending mail people want to receive, senders need to make sure they are collecting addresses and building lists in thoughtful and sustainable ways. For more on this topic, check out my post on list brokers and purchased lists.
These same not-so-simple tricks came up again in my discussion of Gmail filters. Everyone wants a magic formula to reach the inbox, and — sorry to burst your bubble — there isn’t ever going to be one. And this is for a good reason: a healthy filter ecosystem helps protect all of us from malicious senders and criminal activity. The email channel is particularly vulnerable to fraud and theft. The constant evolution of filters is one way mail providers can help protect both senders and recipients — but it can be challenging for senders and systems administrators to keep up with this constant evolution. For example, companies sometimes even inadvertently filter their own mail!
I also wrote a bit about how B2B spam is different from B2C spam, and how marketers can better comply with CAN SPAM guidelines in order to reach the inbox. We also republished our much-missed friend and colleague J.D. Falk’s DKIM Primer, which is extremely useful information that was at a no-longer-active link.
One of my favorite posts this month was about “dueling data”, and how to interpret seemingly different findings around email engagement. We also got some good questions for my “Ask Laura” column, where we cover general topics on email delivery. This month we looked at “no auth/no entry” and the Microsoft Smartscreen filter, both of which are useful things to understand for optimizing delivery.
Finally, we are pleased to announce that we’ve joined the i2Coalition, an organization of internet infrastructure providers. They posted a nice introduction on their blog, and we look forward to working with them to help advocate and protect these important technical infrastructures.