Recent Posts

Back from Vegas

Had a wonderful time at the Email Innovations conference last week. Got a chance to see some familiar faces and meet a lot of new ones.
There is so much new and interesting and exciting stuff going on in the world of email. I think we’re hitting another period for real growth and innovation that’s going to change what we see in our inboxes and how we use email.
 

Read More

Ask Laura: What about Transactional Opt-Outs?

AskLaura_Heading3
Dear Laura,
We are having a bit of an internal struggle on our end as we launch our new quarterly account summaries. What are your views on including an unsubscribe link in these emails?
My personal opinion is that we should. Although the summaries can be classified as “transactional”, they are not tied to a specific recent transaction a customer made and can be viewed as a general reminder to shop again. As I gathered data to present my case, I reviewed several different account summaries and I found it split close to 50/50. Do you have any data or thoughts to support one way or another?
Thanks,
Summary Judgement

Read More

SHOUTY CAPS!!!

Terminal_2__cat__80x32_
Over at Meh Glenn Fleishman has put together a fascinating two-parter on the history of using ALL CAPS for emphasis. And SHOUTING.

Read More

Google drops obsolete crypto

Google is disabling support for email sent using version 3 of SSL or using the RC4 cypher.
They’re both very old – SSLv3 was obsoleted by TLS1.0 in 1999, and RC4 is nearly thirty years old and while it’s aged better than some cyphers there are multiple attacks against it and it’s been replaced with more recent cyphers almost everywhere.
Google has more to say about it on their security blog and if you’re developing software you should definitely pay attention to the requirements there: TLS1.2, SNI, TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256, DNS alternate names with wildcards.
For everyone else, make sure that you’ve applied any patches your vendor has available well before the cutoff date of June 16th.

Read More

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.

Read More

Comcast having a bad day

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

Read More

Your purchased list … is spam.

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

Read More

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.

Read More

Don't just follow the HOWTO

speakingIconForBlogThere 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

Read More

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.

Read More
Categories
Tags