CategoryBest Practices

January 29, 2009

Personal Contacts at ISPs: Part 2

By laura

2 Min read

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29January

I’ve talked quite a bit recently about working with ISPs and personal contacts. Today I have an example of what not to do. One of my ISP friends informed me that another blogger published correspondence from an individual at that ISP, including the individual’s full contact information. The correspondence wasn’t a big deal, the blogger was assigned an IP address by their ISP that was previously...

January 26, 2009

Landing pages

By laura

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26January

One thing I don’t talk about very much is what to do after mail has successfully been delivered to the inbox and the recipient has clicked on a link. Bronto Blog has a post from Friday with tips for successful landing pages.

January 19, 2009

When the script doesn't work

By laura

3 Min read

1 comment

19January

DJ asks in the comments of Friday’s post: As Seth said, great reminder. For those that have great processes/channels in place, I’ve found incredible success. However, sometimes I’ve found my answer on Twitter (i.e., @godaddyguy). Also, there have been times where I’ve gone through the script (i.e., shaw.ca) and have never heard back. What then? This is the reason ISP relations folks get...

December 3, 2008

But that's what spammers do!

By laura

2 Min read

03December

A few weeks ago I was asked my opinion about a delivery situation. It seems that a sender wanted to mail to a purchased email list. They asked what I thought about getting fresh IP addresses and domains to use to send mail to the purchased list. “We know we’re going to get complaints, probably hit spamtraps and generally have problems with the first few sends of the list. We want to...

December 1, 2008

Confirmed unsubscribe

By laura

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01December

Whatever one might think about confirming opt-ins I think we can all agree that requiring someone to jump through hoops and confirm an unsubscription request will just annoy that person. Today I attempt to opt-out from a discussion list. It’s one I *thought* I had opted out of previously, but I could find no record of the request anywhere. OK. So I imagined unsubscribing, I’ll just...

November 24, 2008

TWSD: breaking the law

By laura

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24November

I tell my clients that they should comply with CAN SPAM (physical postal address and unsubscribe option) even if the mail they are sending is technically exempt. The bar for legality is so low, there is no reason not to. Sure, there is a lot of spam out there that does not comply with CAN SPAM. Everything you see from botnets and proxies is in violation, although many of those mails do actually...

October 22, 2008

McCain Campaign Spamming

By laura

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22October

As I mentioned in my post on spam from the Obama campaign, there have been reports of spam coming from the McCain campaign. However, the McCain campaign does not seem to be sending the volume of mail that the Obama campaign is, and so they are not as visible. A recent post over at Denialism Blog shows that the McCain campaign has some of the same problems as the Obama campaign. Chris talks about...

October 21, 2008

Same old stuff

By laura

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21October

Al talks about the “new” email preference service run by the DMA. Except it is not actually new nor is it really used.

October 20, 2008

Email and the Obama Campaign

By laura

3 Min read

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20October

Late in the summer there were people talking about the spam coming from Senator Obama’s presidential campaign. At that time, most of the discussion was focused on the open subscription form on their website and that there were some individuals who had been fraudulently signed up and were now receiving email from the campaign. Last week, the Senator’s campaign again became a topic of discussion...

October 14, 2008

Vetting customers: an intro

By laura

3 Min read

5 comments

14October

I promised a couple weeks ago, pre-MAAWG, to write about screening new customers. Things have been a bit busy and I have not had a lot of time for the blog. However, today there has been a long conversation on one of the spam related mailing lists relating to ESPs and customer screening. This conversation inspired me to write this introduction to customer vetting. I have designed customer...