I can’t do anything except say +1 to this list of ineffective habits of email marketers from Loren McDonald.
August 23, 2013
Insights on how to improve email marketing
23August
August 20, 2013
"Blocked for Bot-like Behavior"
20August
An ESP asked about this error message from Hotmail and what to do about it. “Bot-like” behaviour usually means the sending server is doing something that bots also do. It’s not always that they’re spamming, often it’s a technical issue. But the technical problems make the sending server look like a bot, so the ISP is not taking any chances and they’re going to...
August 13, 2013
TWSD: Don't honor opt-outs
13August
One of the big arguments various mailers make is that they make it easy for users to opt-out of mail, so it’s not a big deal. Users who don’t want to receive the mail, can make it stop. This was one of the guiding principles of CAN SPAM. The sender can make the decision to send mail to any recipient but they have to offer an opt-out. The problem is there are a lot of major companies...
July 24, 2013
Delivery implications of Yahoo releasing usernames
24July
Yahoo announced a few weeks ago it would be releasing account names back into the general pool. This, understandably, caused a lot of concern among marketers about how this would affect email delivery at Yahoo. I had the opportunity to talk with a Yahoo employee last week, and ask some questions about how this might affect delivery. Q: How many email addresses are affected? Yahoo is not providing...
July 11, 2013
The death of IP based reputation
11July
Back in the dark ages of email delivery the only thing that really mattered to get your email into the inbox was having a good IP reputation. If your IP sent good mail most of the time, then that mail got into the inbox and all was well with the world. All that mattered was that good IP reputation. Even better for the people who wanted to game the system and get their spam into the inbox, there...
July 10, 2013
Know what you're promising, and keep your promises
10July
Although we can’t always provide a personal response to your complaint, we do investigate all reports. Please don’t interpret a lack of response as a lack of action taken. If we find that a customer is violating our policies, we will take make sure they stop the violating activity. That’s the response I had when I reported a particularly annoying spammer to a major ISP this...
June 24, 2013
Bad unsubscribe processes
24June
We recently renewed our support contract with VMWare. It’s a weirdly complicated system, in that we can’t buy directly from VMWare, but have to buy through one of their resellers. In this case, we purchased the original hardware from Dell, so we renewed our contract through Dell. Dell sends my email address over to VMWare as part of the transaction. My only role in this is as CFO. I...
June 20, 2013
Feedback from recipients
20June
Please Don’t Add Me to Your Email List
Email marketing wisdom from Forbes and someone who spends a lot of time networking and handing out business cards.
June 6, 2013
Handling SNDS requests
06June
I’ve been working with a new client on getting them signed up for FBLs, whitelists and other sorts of monitoring. One of the places I recommended to them was signing up for the Hotmail Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) program. It’s been a while since I’ve gone through the process, so I decided to sign up our network space to give up to date instructions from to clients. As...
May 31, 2013
TWSD: avoid filters
31May
I was cleaning out one of my spamtraps. This is the one that gets a ton of “legitimate” spam. In the last 12 hours it’s gotten spam advertising: T.G.I.Fridays, KFC, Applebees, LendingTree, Lasix Vision Institute, Khols, Burger King, Match.com, and Vistaprint. The footer of some of the mails are making me laugh, though. It’s clear they’re trying to comply with CAN...
RSS - Posts