One thing anyone collecting email addresses anywhere has to think about is address validation. How do you prevent users from typing bad addresses into your forms? I ran into this yesterday attempting to take an online quiz. Before I was allowed to take the quiz, I had to provide my name, phone number and email address. Initially I attempted to use a tagged email address. This is one that delivers...
An ESP twittered this past week about their new DKIM implementation going live. They were quite happy with themselves. Unfortunately, in their blog post, they mentioned 3 things that DKIM would provide for their customers, and got it wrong on all 3 points. Their confusion is something that a lot of people seem to get wrong about DKIM so I thought I would explain what was wrong. “[M]essages...
There is no such thing as a delivery emergency. They just do not happen. Delivery is fluid, delivery is changing, delivery is complex. But when delivery goes bad it is not an emergency. There is no need to call up an ISP person at home on a Saturday afternoon and ask them to remove the filters. (And, BTW, experience indicates if you do this that you may have future delivery issues at that ISP.)...
One trap I see companies fall into when looking at opt-in and permission is they seem to think that permission is a blanket thing. They believe permission can be bought and sold by the companies that collected email addresses. Legally, they may be correct. But in practice senders cannot decide that they can sell the permission of their recipients to another entity. As Al said today, you cannot...
It’s always interesting to look at what other email marketers are doing and how closely their practices align with what I am recommending to clients. Today’s example is a welcome message I received from Marriott. During my recent trip to visit a client, I gave Marriott my email address. They sent me a welcome message, primarily text that looked good even with images turned off. The...
Multiple times in the last few days people have asked me the question “What do you think about blocking domains owned by anti-spam companies as a way to prevent blocklisting?” The question is not necessarily a bad one, and there are cases where blocking mail to specific domains is a good decision. Often, though, if a spam prevention program consists solely of avoiding sending email to people that...
Last week Ken wrote about a marketer who is claiming he was ripped off by Target Point in a purchased list deal. To the purchaser’s credit he actually looked at the email addresses provided by Target Point, something many list purchasers don’t seem to do. This gave him some idea that the list was not opt-in. […] 788 of the addresses contained some combination or abbreviation of...
A couple clients recently have had bounces from different places indicating that their mails were caught by the recipients’ anti-virus filter. These are some of my better clients sending out daily newsletters. They’ve been mailing for years and I know that they are not phishing. They asked me to investigate the bounce messages. The information I had to work with was minimal. One...
Last week Jon left a comment on my post Following the Script. He gives a familiar story about how he’s having problems contacting Yahoo. It’s funny, I found this thread by searching for alternate means to contact Yahoo FBL. This is because I desperately need to communicate with them and their ‘normal channel’ has been literaly as effective as a shout down a wishing well. […] I’ve...
Over at Spamtacular Mickey talks about the email marketers’ syllogism. Anyone who doesn’t want our mail will opt-out. Most people don’t opt-out. Therefore, most people want our mail. This clearly fallacious reasoning is something I deal with frequently with my clients, particularly those who come to me for reputation repair. They can’t understand why people are calling them spammers...
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