October was action-packed at WttW. We wrapped up some big and interesting client projects (look for some case studies soon!), attended another great M³AAWG conference, and made an exciting announcement that we’re hiring a deliverability specialist. The combination of these frees up some more of my time for blogging, which I’ve really missed. Look for more from me in November and December. In...
The best time to send email
This subject comes up over and over again. Many senders are convinced that there is a best time to send email. Countless research hours have been dedicated to finding that best time to send email. Numerous blog posts discuss what the best time to send email is. From my perspective, there are better places for senders to spend time than figuring out what the exact right time is.But, senders still...
The long tail of domains
I frequently get clients telling me that they have about 15 (20, 30) major domains on their list, and then a long tail of domains with only a couple of recipients. If you sort simply by the left hand side of the @, that’s true. When you’re sending email, it’s not just the domain in the email address that is important. Of equal importance is the MX. The MX is what actually...
Superstition, correlation and reality
I’m not a huge baseball fan, probably a side effect of growing up in a city with no MLB team. But I do enjoy the social aspects of rooting for local teams when they’re winning big games. Last night I was following the World Series score online and switched over to watch the last inning. I posted something about the game on FB just about 30 seconds before the Giant’s outfield...
Disposable addresses
Both Steve and I have blogged about how we use tagged addresses to monitor and manage our incoming mail. This is not something unique to our system, but rather a feature that’s existed in many mail systems for a long time. Many unix systems support tagged addresses out of the box, but there are also commercial MTAs and even some webmail services that support tags. Gmail offers “+...
Spam, Phish or Malware?
Some mornings I check mail from my phone. This showed up this morning. My first thought was “oh, no, Pizza Hut is spamming, wonder who sold them my address.” Then I remembered that iOS is horrible and won’t show you anything other than the Friendly From and maybe it was some weird phishing scheme. When I got to my real mail client I checked headers, and sure enough, it...
Three things marketers should do when domains are retired
A few weeks ago I was alerted to a domain change for INGDirect. The ingdirect.com domain is being retired and all users are migrating to the capitalone.com domain. As part of this change usernames are NOT being transferred, so if you have @ingdirect.com addresses on any B2B mailing list, you will need to drop those addresses and find the new contact information for the subscriber. What should...
Gmail announces new "Inbox" product
Gmail announced today on their blog a new product “Inbox” to help make the inbox more useful and more of a center of activity. “We get more email now than ever, important information is buried inside messages, and our most important tasks can slip through the cracks—especially when we’re working on our phones. For many of us, dealing with email has become a daily chore that...
Bounces at Verizon
There have been lots of reports of Verizon rejecting valid email addresses for a few hours this morning. They seem to have fixed things now but you probably want to make sure you didn’t suppress those addresses.
SWAKS: the SMTP Swiss Army Knife
SWAKS is a general purpose testing tool for SMTP. For basic SMTP testing it’s a more convenient, scriptable alternative to running a transaction by hand, but it also lets you test things that are difficult to do manually, such as authentication or TLS encryption. It’s a perl script that installs fairly easily on OS X or any Linux/unix system (and can be installed on Windows, if you...