CategoryDelivery Improvement

August 12, 2016

Ask Laura: What should we be measuring?

By laura

4 Min read

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12August

Dear Laura, We are trying to evaluate the success of our email programs, and I don’t have a good sense of what metrics we should be monitoring. We have a lot of data, but I don’t have a good sense of what matters and what doesn’t. Can you advise us what we should look at and why? Thanks, Metrics Are Hard Dear Metrically-Challenged, You’re not going to like this answer, but here goes. It depends...

June 7, 2016

Who owns the inbox

By laura

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07June

One of the questions asked of my panel during Connections 16 last month was who owns the inbox. My point of view is that the end user owns the inbox, with a few minor exceptions. For instance, in the case of a business, the business owns the inbox. With email marketing, the marketing is entering a personal space as an invited guest. Senders need to be cognizant of this to continue having access...

April 25, 2016

The source of deliverability problems

By laura

2 Min read

2 comments

25April

Most deliverability problems don’t start where many people think they do. So very often people call looking for deliverability help and tell me all about the things they’re doing to reach the inbox. They’ll tell me about content, they’ll tell me about bounces, they’ll talk about complaints, engagement, opens and clicks. Rarely will they bring up their list source...

April 6, 2016

Dueling data

By laura

5 Min read

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06April

One of the things I miss about being in science is the regular discussions (sometimes heated) about data and experimental results. To be fair, I get some of that when talking about email stuff with Steve. We each have some strong view points and aren’t afraid to share them with each other and with other people. In fact, one of the things we hear most when meeting folks for the first time...

March 15, 2016

The 10 worst …

By laura

2 Min read

2 comments

15March

Spamhaus gave a bunch of us a preview of their new “Top 10 worst” (or should that be bottom 10?) lists at M3AAWG. These lists have now been released to the public. The categories they’re measuring are: Countries Spam ISPs Spammers Botnet Countries Botnet ISPs Botnet ASNs TLDs Nothing really surprising there, but it’s nice to see the numbers. I have to wonder if the listing...

January 29, 2016

Ask Laura

By laura

4 Min read

1 comment

29January

An Advice Column on Email Delivery When we work with brands and senders to improve email delivery, there are many questions that come up again and again. For 2016, we thought it might be interesting to answer some of those questions here on the blog so others can benefit from the information. Confused about delivery in general? Trying to keep up on changing policies and terminology? Need some...

December 10, 2015

Troubleshooting delivery is hard, but doable

By laura

3 Min read

1 comment

10December

Even for those of us who’ve been around for a while, and who have a lot of experience troubleshooting delivery problems things are getting harder. It used to be we could identify some thing about an email and if that thing was removed then the email would get to the inbox. Often this was a domain or a URL in the message that was triggering bulk foldering. Filters aren’t so simple now...

December 3, 2015

CASL botnet take down

By laura

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03December

The CRTC served its first ever warrant as part of an international botnet takedown. The warrant was to take down a C&C (command and control) server for Win32/Dorkbot. International efforts to take down C&C servers take a lot of effort and work and coordination. I’ve only ever heard stories from folks involved but the scale and work that goes into these take downs is amazing. Bots...

November 23, 2015

Tell me about your business model

By laura

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23November

I posted Friday about how most deliverability folks roll their eyes when a sender starts talking about their business model. The irony is that one of the first things I do with a client is ask them to tell me about their business model and how email fits into their business plan. Once I know that, I can help them improve their email sending to meet the requirements of ISPs, blocklists and...

November 9, 2015

SPF debugging

By steve

2 Min read

1 comment

09November

Someone mentioned on a mailing list that mail “from” intuit.com was being filed in the gmail spam folder, with the warning “Our systems couldn’t verify that this message was really sent by intuit.com“. That warning means that Gmail thinks it may be phishing mail. Given they’re a well-known financial services organization, I’m sure there is a lot of...