CategoryBest Practices

December 9, 2016

Ask Laura: Should we confirm unsubscribes?

By laura

3 Min read

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09December

Dear Laura, We have some questions about best practices for unsubscribes. Our ESP uses the List-Unsubscribe header by default on every email. I’m not familiar with this, and I have some questions for you. First, do you think this is a good idea? Should we always use it, or just for certain emails? Should we use the mailto:link or link to a web site to unsubscribe? We were also asked about double...

December 6, 2016

Outreach or spam?

By laura

3 Min read

6 comments

06December

This showed up in my mailbox earlier today: The tweet in question From Crunchbase: “Pluck is an email prospecting tool that gives you the email addresses of the people tweeting about subjects related to your business.” Prospecting: another name for spamming. Look, I know that you want to sell you’re newest, greatest product to the world. But just because I tweet something with a...

November 28, 2016

DNSBLs, wildcards and domain expiration

By laura

4 Min read

4 comments

28November

Last week the megarbl.net domain name expired. Normally this would have no affect on anyone, but their domain registrar put in a wildcard DNS entry. Because of how DNSBLs work, this had the effect of causing every IP to be listed on the blocklist. The domain is now active and the listings due to the DNS wildcard are removed. How does a domain expiration lead to a DNSBL listing the whole internet...

October 31, 2016

Zombies are real but less of a problem

By laura

1 Min read

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31October

A few years ago I wrote a series of blog posts about zombie email addresses. Zombie addresses are those that someone owned and used and interacted with, but for whatever reason stopped logging into and checking. This series started with the time before the zombies, and moved on to the zombie uprising. Then discussed how they don’t eat brains, but they do love to take a bite out of...

September 30, 2016

Ask Laura: Should we allow tagged addresses?

By laura

4 Min read

1 comment

30September

Hi Laura, First of all, I’d like to thank you for the amazing blog. It helps me a lot and I have much fun to read it. Now I have a question to the google alias addresses. As you must have known, Google offers alias addresses and you can put any thing between the local part and @gmail.com with a “+” sign What do you think, what should the onlineshops deal with such address for...

September 23, 2016

Global Suppression Lists

By steve

3 Min read

2 comments

23September

Global Suppression List. Pander File. Screamers List. Whatever you call it, it’s the list of email addresses you suppress from every mailing. If you’re an ESP, this is the list of people who you never, ever want to send email to – and I’m talking about ESP-wide global suppression lists here, not the suppression lists maintained per-customer. Global suppression lists are a...

September 21, 2016

Use the form…

By laura

2 Min read

1 comment

21September

A lot of senders get frustrated with the time it can take to get a response from some ISPs. It’s totally understandable, for a lot of companies delivery problems are all hands on deck level problems. They want them fixed and they want them fixed IMMEDIATELY. They want feedback that their issue is being addressed. They want to know someone at the ISP knows there is a problem. I’ve...

September 8, 2016

Incentivizing incites fraud

By laura

3 Min read

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08September

There are few address acquisition processes that make me cringe as badly as incentivized point of sale collection. Companies have tried many different ways to incentivize address collection at the point of sale. Some offer the benefit to the shopper, like offering discounts if they supply an email address. Some offer the benefits to the employee. Some offer punishments to the employee if they...

September 6, 2016

Arguing against the anti-spam policy

By laura

3 Min read

4 comments

06September

Not long ago I was talking with a colleague who works for an ESP.  She was telling me about this new client who is in the process of negotiating a contract. Normally she doesn’t get involved in negotiations, but the sales group brought her. It seems this new client is attempting to remove all mention of the anti-spam policy from the contract. As she is the deliverability and compliance...

August 26, 2016

Ask Laura: Is it spam?

By laura

4 Min read

1 comment

26August

Dear Laura, I’ve been having a discussion with a colleague who is particularly frustrated by unwanted email he gets from retailers. Specifically, these are retailers who he’s never given an email address, but whose sites he’s browsed recently. He understands how retargeting works with web ads, but questions if it’s really acceptable to retarget in the email channel or if that violates CAN-SPAM or...