I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion on various fora recently about increased delivery issues at Hotmail. Some senders are seeing more deferrals, some senders are seeing more mail in the bulk folder. Some senders aren’t seeing any changes. This leads me to believe that Hotmail made some adjustments to their filtering recently. Given some senders are unaffected, this appears to be a...
After Epsilon lost a bunch of customer lists last week, I’ve been keeping an eye open to see if any of the vendors I work with had any of my email addresses stolen – not least because it’ll be interesting to see where this data ends up. Yesterday I got mail from Marriott, telling me that “unauthorized third party gained access to a number of Epsilon’s accounts...
I stumbled across an interesting problem today. A company I bought something from a while back added me to their newsletter. They seem to be having trouble making sales this quarter, as they’ve gone from an occasional email every few weeks to bombarding me with increasingly desperate offers in the past week or two. So I do what most recipients do in that situation (well, the ones who...
One of the things I notice is when vendors send me badly formatted emails. There’s one vendor of ours that gets it so wrong I find it offensive to receive their mails. Not only have they not managed to invoice or process payments correctly for months, but their billing emails come to me with one of the ugliest From: lines I’ve ever seen. Now, I’ve seen Dave Crocker’s...
I’ve had a couple of people ask me about MIME structure recently, especially how you create multipart messages, when you should use them and which variant of multipart you use for different things. (And I’m working on a MIME parser / generator for Abacus at the moment, so it’s all fresh in my mind) So I’ve put together a quick cheat sheet, showing the structure of four...
Ben over at Mailchimp has a good post about his response (and his support staff’s more professional and helpful response) to inquires asking if Mailchimp can guarantee an improvement in delivery. I sympathize with Ben, and commend his staff. I often get potential clients asking me if I can guarantee I can get their mail to the inbox or get them off a public or private blocklist. And, the...
My Mum flew in to visit last week, and over dinner one evening the talk turned to email. We don’t get much spam on Yahoo, mostly because we don’t give our email address out much. The only spam we really get is from <stockbroker website>, and that all goes to the spam folder. We use the site for checking stock quotes – it’s free, and we never see any of the spam they...
A client of a friend was getting rejection messages when they tried to send mail Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 554 554 5.7.1 The IP address of web site www.client.com [75.101.163.44] is listed at...
How do you approach the first contact with a potential customer or prospect? Do you just jump right in and start making your pitch or do you actually take the time to introduce yourself and your company? Most good sales reps spend a little time socializing with prospects before they launch into the sales process, particularly when they are cold calling the target. This courtesy doesn’t seem...
A lot of email marketing best practices center around getting permission to send email to recipients. A lot of anti-spammers argue that the issue is consent not content. Both groups seem to agree that permission is important, but more often than not they disagree about what constitutes permission. For some the only acceptable permission is round trip confirmation, also known as confirmed opt-in...
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