Recent Posts

January 2015 – The Month in Email

It’s February already! January went fast, right? At WttW, we are gearing up for MAAWG SF later this month — will we see you there?
We started the year with a set of predictions about email. Mostly we think email will continue to be great at some things and not-so-great at other things, and we’ll keep fighting the good fight to make it better.
As always, I’m interested in filters and how spammers continue to work around them to reach the inbox. I also wrote about how the language of an email impacts delivery, and wrote an expanded response to a comment suggesting email filters should be illegal. You can guess where I stand on that (and if you can’t, perhaps you might read more about how email is an inherently malicious traffic stream…)
I also took a moment to point out a trend I’m really enjoying, which is the rise of content marketing (a.k.a. giving customers useful and interesting information they can’t find elsewhere). As I said in the post, I’ll be curious to see how ROI plays out with this strategy.
We also talked about some of the less exciting content we see in email, notably the infamous Murkowski Statement, by which a spammer declares “Nope! Nothing to see over here!”
Steve also pointed out some content shenanigans in the form of hidden preview text, with some additional clarification from the original marketer in the comments.
In industry news, the big story was that Microsoft has partially implemented DMARC for Office365, and was the first to make a public statement about the specific ways they’ve chosen to implement. In my post, I did a walkthrough of a message to illustrate a bit about how this works, which might be useful if you’re trying to wrap your head around DMARC implementations.
We also talked about consolidation in the ESP space, and got a number of comments from readers about who they think might be next. Shortly thereafter, Listcast was acquired by MailerMailer.
Josh noted a few major shutdowns: Yahoo China email services and the AHBL list. The latter explores the challenges inherent in decommissioning a blacklist, and there’s a good discussion in the comments, so you might check it out if you missed that earlier this month.
Josh also pointed to the Salesforce State of Marketing report, which is always a useful set of metrics about how marketers are using email and other channels. It’s definitely worth a read.

Read More

MessageSystems Acquires Port25

This morning MessageSystems announced they had acquired Port25 systems. These two platforms were some of the powerhouse brands in the email space. Momentum was the system used by big programs that needed precise control over all their mail from many different streams. Port25 was a lower cost but still powerful system that was accessible to many different size companies.
This acquisition gives MessageSystems the ability to address both market segments.
Port25 staff are all part of the acquisition and the software will continue to be developed and maintained as a separate product from the Momentum line. I, for one, am relieved to hear that. Port25 is a solid piece of software that meets the sending needs of many small and medium size companies.
Congratulations to the great folks at MessageSystems and Port25. I’m excited to see what happens with both programs under the same roof.

Read More

ISPs speak at the EEC conference

Massimo Arrigoni has a great blog post up summarizing the final session of the EEC conference with representatives from major mailbox providers. This session a number of representatives from major mailbox providers spoke about what it takes to get to the inbox. They discussed what engagement really was, why you need to warmup and what the mailbox providers are measuring.
The short version is delivery is becoming more and more personalized. It’s not about if a mailbox provider thinks mail is spam, it’s about if a mailbox provider thinks this recipient thinks the mail will be spam. It’s all about connecting with each individual recipient.
None of this should be news to any of our regular readers. We’ve long talked about how ISPs measure things differently than senders. We’ve also talked about personalized delivery and how IP reputation isn’t the most important part of delivery.
Know your recipients. Make them want your mail and it will end up in the inbox. ‘
Edit: EmailCopilot also has more information on the ISP session at EEC.

Read More

Amazon launching new email service WorkMail

Amazon is launching a new email service called Amazon WorkMail.  Amazon already offers a Simple Email Service (SES) that allows customers to send outbound-only emails and unlike SES, WorkMail will be a full feature email, calendaring, and client management product.  The new WorkMail mail service will compete with enterprise email solutions such as Microsoft Exchange Server.  WorkMail will support the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol, something that Google disabled with Gmail in early 2013, and will include Mobile Device Management and Active Directory Integration. The new service will also utilize Amazon’s AWS Key Management Service that allows the customer to create and control their own encryption keys used to encrypt their data on AWS.
Amazon WorkMail will also scan all incoming and outgoing email for spam, malware, and viruses, however, it’s not clear yet if they are going with a third-party solution or will be creating their own filtering system.

Read More

Everyone.net SMTP Issues

Everyone.net engineers are investigating a SMTP connectivity issue.
Everyone.net Status Page

Read More

Email filtering: not going away.

VirusBlockI don’t do a whole lot of filtering of comments here. There are a couple people who are moderated, but generally if the comments contribute to a discussion they get to be posted. I do get the occasional angry or incoherent comment. And sometimes I get a comment that is triggers me to write an entire blog post pointing out the problems with the comment.
Today a comment from Joe King showed up for The Myth of the Low Complaint Rate.

Read More

Deliverability, Return Path, List-Unsubscribe Header

Here are a few blog posts covering the email industry from Constant Contact, Return Path, and SpamResource.
Constant Contact posted a blog post about how they measure email deliverability on January 10th.  They started with just tracking bounce backs and using that metric to calculate deliverability but then moved to using seed list through a third-party and report that they get 97% deliverability.  Read more at Constant Contact
On January 6th, Return Path recapped their most read blog posts which includes covering Yahoo’s DMARC Reject Policy, Blacklist Basics, and GMails new FBL and Unsubscribe button. Read more at Return Path
Return Path and SpamResource both have an excellent write-ups about the preference change at Outlook.com/Hotmail regarding the List-Unsubscribe header.  Microsoft, like Google, prefers to use mailto instead of http or other URI protocols for the List-Unsubscribe header.
 

Read More

Salesforce State of Marketing Report

Salesforce published their State of Marketing report last week. The report was compiled after receiving 5,000 responses to their questionnaire. Reading the report it is clear, email is critical to businesses. 73% of marketers believe email marketing is core to their business, 71% felt mobile marketing was core, and 66% of social media marketing was core to their business.
Other interesting figures are, 47% reported that the click-through rate as the most important email marketing metric and 23% didn’t know what device emails are read on.
Comparing the 2015 responses to the 2014 survey, email as a primary revenue source increased from 16% to 20%, email as a critical enabler of products and services increased from 42% to 60%, and email as an indirect impact of business performance decreased from 42% to 20%.
It is clear that email as a marketing tool will see increase usage in 2015. The report isn’t just reporting responses, it has several good recommendations such as doing a spring-cleaning of your email list and suggests sending a re-engagement campaign that invites subscribers to update their preference. This would give users the ability to opt-out as they may only have been interested in holiday deals and making it easy to opt-out will help prevent users from reporting the email as spam.

Read More

Mailbox preview and HTML content

I just received a slightly confusing email.
 
Inbox__86332_messages__19_unread_
 
The From address and the Subject line are from Sony, but the content looks like it’s from email analytics firm Litmus. What’s going on here?
Opening the mail it looks like a fairly generic “Oops, we lost a class-action lawsuit, have $2 worth of worthless internet points!” email from Sony; no mention of Litmus at all. My first thought is that Mail.app has managed to scramble it’s summary database and it’s pulling summaries from the wrong email, as I am on a Litmus mailing list or two, but nothing else looks off.
Digging around inside the source of the mail I do find a bunch of tracking gifs from emltrk.com, which is a Litmus domain so there is a Litmus connection there somewhere. Curious.
Finally, about two pages in to the HTML part of the mail I find this:

Read More

Office365 checking DMARC on the inbound

According to a recent blog post, Office365 is starting to evaluate incoming messages for DMARC. I talked a little bit about DMARC in April when Yahoo started publishing a p=reject message.

Read More
Categories
Tags