Many people believe that if they remove non-existent addresses from their mailing lists that their lists will make it to the inbox without a problem. In fact, an entire industry has grown up around the idea that sending mail to valid addresses can never be spam. This isn’t true, of course, spammers use many of the same techniques legitimate mailers do to clean their lists. I don’t...
All too often folks come to me with delivery problems and lead off with all of the things they’ve done to send mail right. They assure me they’re using SPF and DKIM and DMARC and they can’t understand why things are bad. There is this pervasive belief that if you do all the technical things right then you will reach the inbox. Getting the technical bits right is an important...
There was a discussion on Slack about the economics of email. It’s probably not a surprise that I have opinions (Who owns the inbox? Ownership of the Inbox). There was a discussion about this that was useful enough I’d share it. Participants: Laura: Laura Atkins (me!)Steve: Steve Atkins (other half of WttW)Matt V: Director Privacy @ 250ok Laura: Direct mail to your home the owner...
There are times when I hesitate to call what marketers do “spam.” I can use the euphemisms with the best of ’em. “Cold emails” “Targeted Marketing” “B2B marketing.” I’ll say it here and now: cold emails are spam. Sales people who are sending enough email that they require automation to actually send the mail are spamming. Look at this...
A comment came in on Engagement and Deliverability and I thought it was a good question and deserved a discussion. Good article. My question about Gmail engagement is how would I reach someone who has not been opening my emails? Say I want to do a re-engagement campaign. If I temporarily suppress a contact from my list for a period of time and only send to my engaged contacts, will that contact...
When I checked in on Facebook this morning there was a discussion from a couple people frustrated by cousin domains. I share their frustration. Kitten running through field with text “every time a marketing department registers a cousin domain, god kills a kitten” Cousin domains are a major problem for ISPs trying to protect their users from phishing and other fraud. Because so many companies use...
Spamtraps strike fear into the heart of senders. They’ve turned into this monster metric that can make or break a marketing program. They’ve become a measure and a goal and I think some senders put way too much emphasis on spamtraps instead of worrying about their overall data accuracy. Recently I got a question from a client about the chances that any address they were currently...
This morning I got an email to a tagged address. The tag matched the company so it’s very likely I did actually sign up. Digging back through my mailbox, I see one previous email to that account – back in 2008. 2008. One email. Who knows why I signed up and gave them an email address. Maybe I made a comment on their website. Or perhaps I signed up while investigating something for a...
Never add someone to a mailing list without giving them a heads up that you’re doing it. It’s just uncool and rude. For example, I have been contacting some vendors about some work we need done. One of them has yet to answer my inquiry, but has already added me to their newsletter. Even worse, I had no idea submitting a form asking about their services would get me on their mailing...
Yesterday the NJABL domain expired. The list was disabled back in 2013 but the domain continued to be maintained as a live domain. With the expiration, it was picked up by domain squatters and is now listing everything. Steve wrote about how and why expired blocklist domains list the world last year. The short version is, that when domain squatters grab a domain they put in a DNS entry that...
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