I was doing some research today for an article I’m working on. The research led me to a San Francisco Law Review article from 2001 written by David E. Sorkin. Technical and Legal Approaches to Unsolicited Electronic Mail (.pdf link). The text itself is a little outdated, although not as much as I expected. There’s quite a good discussion of various ways to control spam, most of which...
Dear Laura, I sometimes get in arguments with clients where I say, “your open rate is 3%, you need to do some list pruning” and they say, “my recipient list is 100% b2b, and b2b filters don’t care about engagement, so it doesn’t matter if my list is really old and unengaged.” This is wrong in cases where the business is using Outlook or Gsuite, both of which are going to care if they see...
Countless questions about email troubleshooting start with “does anyone know why.” Unfortunately, most of these questions don’t contain enough detail to get a useful answer. In the case of email, even the smallest redactions, like the IP address and the domain in question, can make it difficult for anyone to provide help. Details matter. Every detail matters, sending IP and...
Yesterday I talked about all the reasons that using affiliate email can hurt overall delivery. In some cases, though, marketing departments and the savvy email marketer don’t have a choice in the matter. Someone in management makes a decision and employees are expected to implement it. If you’re stuck in a place where you have to hire an affiliate, how can you protect the opt-in...
Most retailers have realized that sending unsolicited email is bad for their overall deliverability. Still, the idea they can send mail to people who never heard of them is seductive. Enter affiliate email. That magical place where companies hire an agency, or a contractor, or some other third party to send email advertising their new product. Their mail and company reputation is protected...
A bunch of folks reported problems with Microsoft’s SNDS page earlier today. This afternoon, our friendly Microsoft rep told the mailop mailing list that it should be fixed. If you see problems again, you can report it to mailop or your ESP and the message will get shared to the folks who can fix it. The other big thing that happened today was Gmail rolled out their new inbox layout...
Brick and mortar stores have tried to use feedback as a means of driving customer engagement for a while. Anyone who’s shopped at a big chain here in the US knows what I mean. You buy a pack of gum and end up with a 2 foot long receipt. At the bottom of the receipt there is a URL and bar code. The cashier circles the bar code and cheerfully tells you to go online and tell corporate about...
Update: The issue seems to have been resolved and Laposte say they’re no longer sending the 519 responses as of April 25th 2018. Laposte.net are having a bad couple of weeks. There’ve been reports from customers of their IMAP service being unusable, with attempts to move or delete messages timing out and expected emails simply not arriving. Several delivery friends have mentioned that...
In the early years of the spam problem, a common piece of advice was to never unsubscribe. At the time, this made a lot of sense. Multiple anti-spammers documented spammers harvesting addresses from unsubscribe forms. This activity tapered off around 2000 or so, although the myth persisted for much longer. These days, there isn’t much harm in unsubscribing. I even spent a full month...
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