You can’t technical your way out of the bulk folder. I wrote that a year and a half ago, and it’s even more true today. Filters at the big webmail providers continue to evolve to meet new threats and new spamming techniques. Sending technically perfect mail won’t get your mail into the inbox. Recipients have to want the mail and interact with the mail for good delivery.
Wow! Congrats to all the senders out there for sending So Much Volume that mail servers are full. I’ve even seen reports that STARTTLS connections are taking multiple seconds to establish at Gmail. The volume of mail that it takes to make Google slow down is impressive. Of course, Gmail isn’t the only system exhibiting slow downs. Other major consumer webmail providers are also...
Everyone ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns? I know many retailers are already mailing, my inbox is exploding with offers. For me, this is often a quiet time of the year. As a strategist, most of my worked happened months ago. Now, it’s time for execution. I wish everyone a successful week of mailing. May your deliverability be high. May your subject lines be correct. May...
Catchall domains accept any mail to any email address at that domain. They were quite common, particularly at smaller domains, a long time ago. For various reasons, most of them having to do with spammers, they’re less common now. Most folks think catchall domains are only used for spamtraps. As a consequence, many of the address verification tools will filter out, or recommend filtering...
Congrats to the folks at SendGrid for raising over 130 million in their IPO yesterday. Also, cool stock symbol, bro.
A number of people have mentioned over the last couple weeks that they’re seeing a spike in Yahoo rejecting mail with
554 delivery error: dd Requested mail action aborted
Discussions on various mailing lists indicate these messages are related to inactive accounts. Addresses that bounce at Yahoo with these codes should be handled as inactive addresses and removed from future mailings.
Two of the very first posts I wrote on the blog were about permission (part 1, part 2). Re-reading those posts is interesting. Experience has taught me that recipients are much more forgiving of implicit opt-in than that post implies. The chance in recipient expectations doesn’t mean, however, that permission isn’t important or required. In fact, The Verge reported on a chatbot that...
Today is one of those days I just want to argue with all the subject headers of the marketing email I get.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) November 10, 2017
A few weeks ago ProPublica was the victim of a subscription bomb attack. Julia Angwin found my blog post on the subject and contacted me to talk about the post. We spent an hour or so on the phone and I shared some of the information we had on the problem. Julie told me she was interested in investigating this further problem further. Today, ProPublica published Cheap Tricks: the Low Cost of...
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