Blog

September 1, 2015

Do system administrators have too much power?

By meri

6 Min read

4 comments

01September

Yesterday, Laura brought a thread from last week to my attention, and the old-school ISP admin and mail geek in me felt the need to jump up and say something in response to Paul’s comment. My text here is all my own, and is based upon personal experience as well as those of my friends. That said, I’m not speaking on their behalf, either. 🙂 I found Paul’s use of the word ‘SysAdmin’ to be a...

August 31, 2015

Politics and Delivery

By laura

4 Min read

1 comment

31August

Last week I posted some deliverability advice for the DNC based on their acquisition of President Obama’s 2012 campaign database. Paul asked a question on that post that I think is worth some attention. I am fascinated by the ramifications of email deliverability for political donations. Are there sysadmins at the big ISPs who make human decisions on deliverability issues anymore? The power...

August 28, 2015

Deliverability advice to the DNC

By laura

4 Min read

2 comments

28August

I was working on another post for this afternoon, but when I checked Facebook Autumn Tyr-Salvia had posted a link that’s much more interesting to talk about. It seems the Democratic National Committee has acquired President Obama’s email list from the 2012 campaign. The […] list […] includes details about the amount donors gave and how they prefer to be contacted, will be...

August 26, 2015

Deliverability strategy to reach the inbox

By laura

2 Min read

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26August

I wrote a piece for the Only Influencers special Holiday Preparations edition about deliverability and the holiday email rush. One thing I like about the chance to write for other publications is the process often leads me down thought pathways and generate some new ideas. One thing this post helped crystalize in my mind is the idea that every company doing email marketing needs a deliverability...

August 25, 2015

Still Spamming…

By laura

3 Min read

2 comments

25August

This morning I woke up to news that Sanford Wallace pled guilty to spamming. Again. Sanford was one of the very early spammers (savetrees.com). He moved to email from junk faxing when Congress made junk faxing illegal in 2005. He sued AOL when AOL blocked his mail. He lost and the courts maintained that blocking spam was not a violation of the sender’s rights. Sanford then moved on to using...

August 24, 2015

Check your tech

By laura

2 Min read

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24August

One of the things we do for just about every new client coming into WttW is have them send us an email from their bulk mail system. We then check it for technical correctness. This includes things like reviewing all the different From headers, rDNS of the connecting IP, List-Unsubscribe headers and authentication. This is always useful, IMO, because we often find things that were right when they...

August 21, 2015

Utilizing all of your data

By josh

2 Min read

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21August

Email marketing continues to be a great way to reach out to prospects and customers and many companies utilize multiple mail streams. Companies often have the following systems sending mail: Welcome Messages for new subscribers Transactional Messages such as password resets or receipts from purchases Drip programs from a marketing automation system Direct to customers via CRM Depending on your...

August 20, 2015

The FTC answers questions about CAN SPAM

By laura

1 Min read

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20August

The FTC posted answers to a number of questions about the CAN SPAM act. Email is an essential part of most companies’ marketing strategy. If you send commercial email – or have others send it for you – are you complying with the CAN-SPAM Act and the FTC’s CAN-SPAM Rule? FTC attorney Christopher Brown answers some of the CAN-SPAM questions businesses are asking. Nothing really surprising...

August 19, 2015

Linking identities to email addresses

By laura

4 Min read

1 comment

19August

As I predicted yesterday, a bunch of sites have popped up where you can input email addresses and find out if the address was part of the Ashley Madison hack. My spam trap address isn’t on it, which makes me wonder if unsubscribe data was kept elsewhere or if they just never bothered to save the requests. One of the things I’m seeing in most articles about the hack is reassurance that...

August 18, 2015

Ashley Madison Compromise

By laura

2 Min read

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18August

Last month Brian Krebs reported that the Ashley Madison database was compromised. Ashley Madison is a dating site that targets married folks who are looking to have affairs. Needless to say, there is a lot of risk for users if their data is found on the released data. Today what is supposedly the Ashley Madison data was released. The release of this data can have some significant impacts on the...