Recent Posts

Barracuda Email Security Service disruption

Starting around ~~10:15~~ 2:45 EDT this morning, the Barracuda Email Security Service is having a issues processing email for customers.
More information on Twitter and reddit

A code glitch in a new DBL sub-zone known as 'Abused-Legit' caused the new Abused-Legit zone to list ".net." for 60 minutes from 08:35 UTC.
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Google's Inbox Team answers questions on Reddit

The team behind Google’s new Inbox app did an “Ask us Anything” Q&A with reddit on December 3rd. The team consisted of a Product Manager, Designer, and Software Engineer and for two hours the team answered all sorts of questions.
Most of the questions were about new features or supporting additional email providers and it showed just how new this app is, it’s not quite ready to be your primary email client as Inbox only supports personal Gmail accounts. The Inbox team mentions they are working on supporting additional mail providers but does not give a timeline of when that would be available.
For email marketers, Google Inbox shares the same HTML sanitizer and media queries that Gmail does and when asked about email filtering it was mentioned that the direct marketing community would benefit by having a place for their emails within the Promos tab. They describe the Promo tab as

Our new team members

This has been a busy year here at Word to the Wise. We started out launching our new website in Q1 and have been busily growing our client base. In order to meet the increased demand for our expertise, we’ve brought in new team members.
Meri has been working with us for a few months, helping me with client research and generally keeping my schedule under control. She was previously in ops at some large ISPs.
Josh started last week; he comes to us with a strong technical background and experience building teams. He was previously at Mansell Group (now Whatcounts). Josh will be working on client projects and helping us build out our team. Josh will also be contributing to the blog, look for his first post later this week.
We’re so excited to have both Meri and Josh at WttW. This is a big, exciting step forward in our company and we’re so glad they’ve decided to join us.

Delays at Comcast

I’m seeing a significant amount of chatter on various lists that queues to Comcast are backing up right now. Looks to be something on their end.
Error messages are 421 “Try again later.” I’ll see if I can find someone at Comcast to give me some info.

Lorem Ipsum for PII

When you’re developing code to handle data it’s almost essential to have a decent sized set of test data, so you can build a test harness to check on functionality and performance as you go.
A common way of doing that is to take a snapshot of your production database and pull out an appropriate subset from there. That works pretty well in most cases, but it’s a really bad idea if the data you’re working with is personally identifiable information, such as email addresses, phone numbers, credit cards and so on.
Test data gets spread everywhere. It’s checked in to source control systems, copied to developers laptops, included in publicly visible bug reports, shared with mailing lists when asking questions and sent to that dodgy overseas outsourcing company your CTO is evaluating. And if the code you’re developing sends email or SMS messages then sooner or later you’re going to misconfigure your test platform and send test messages to the contacts in your test data. (I’ve only done that once, and it was a memorable experience.)
But test data needs to be similar to real data, and look plausible, or it’s hard for manual testers to identify problems using it.
Enter randomuser.me – a simple API for generating random user data – name, email address, birthdate, phone numbers, postal address, social security number, even photos.
Need something more configurable, that lets you create a fake API to test your code against? Try RandomAPI for a web API returning JSON, SQL, CSV or YAML.
Just need some test JSON files you can generate and paste in to your test suite? Try JSON Generator.
Need bulk data, to load into your test database? Look at Mockaroo, DummyData or GenerateData.
Just don’t use your production PII, even if you plan on anonymizing it before use. Really.

Spam is about invading other people's space

At the recent Sendgrid Emailmatter’s conference Sally Lehman advised attendees to “Treat someone’s inbox like it was their home.” This is advice I’ve been giving clients for a long time. I think it’s even more relevant now as so many people have data enabled phones and are checking email so frequently. It’s not just their home, it’s their personal space they can take with them.
Seanan McGuire, a friend and NY Times bestselling author, wrote a blog post today about how she views promotion and marketing as an artist and someone who is expected to promote her work. She also talks about what it feels like to be a target of promotion and offers some advice about how to promote your products online. She talks about how she, as an author and creative type, is expected to do some level of self promotion and how that promotion is done in her space – whether that space be on twitter or her blog.

November 2014 – the month in email

Over the years, we get many of the same questions again and again. This isn’t a complaint; it’s a useful opportunity for us to check in and see if the technologies, policies and best practices have evolved over time, or if our previous recommendations still stand. One example this month of something that has changed (the situation has improved a bit): Using URL shorteners and one that has not: The Best Time to Send Email.

Congestion at Verizon

Yahoo! finally found their broken cable (I had no idea Yahoo had fiber) and fixed it. Now, I’m seeing a lot of reports that Verizon is accepting mail very, very slowly. Some folks are reporting no more than 20 messages a minute. This could be due to congestion, and just an underpowered system, or it could be some purposeful throttling on Verizon’s end.
In any case, this is affecting a lot of senders and not just the marketing end of things.
Updates as I get them.

Friendly email addresses

Most of the time when we’re talking about email addresses, we’re talking about the actual user@domain format that’s used to send mail over the wire, but that’s not how we most often see them. When they’re used in a To: or From: header they’re usually associated with a display name – the “real name” of the user with the associated email address. In the From: field that’s often called the “friendly from”, but the syntax used in the To:, Cc: and Bcc: fields is identical.
The display name is important, as it’s shown more in mail clients than the actual email address is. Some mobile clients don’t display the email address at all, just the display name.
There are three ways you can put an email address in a header field.
The best way is to wrap the email address itself in angle brackets, and put the display name in front of it.