I saw a headline today: New Research from Return Path Shows Strong Correlation Between Subscriber Engagement and Spam Placement I have to admit, my first reaction was “Uh, Yeah.” But then I realized that there are some email marketers who do not believe engagement is important for email deliverability. This is exactly the report they need to read. It lays out the factors that ISPs...
In my previous career I studied the effect of alcohol on developing embryos. It’s a bit weird I ended up in that field because embryological development always seemed to complex to me. And it was and is complicated. In a lot of ways, though, it was good training for deliverability. We dealt with a lot of processes that seem, on the surface, straightforward. Fertilization happens, then you...
Today is International Women’s Day. In recognition of this day, there has been a call for a general woman’s strike. I thought long and hard about how I would participate in this event. Even yesterday I had no clear view of whether or not I would be working today. As a self-employed woman, me not working today only hurts me and my clients. There’s no one to leave work for, I...
Yesterday there was a lot of talk about Verizon moving out of email and transitioning all their customers over to the AOL backend. The source was a page in the Verizon help center about transitioning an email address. There is no date on the page, so it’s unclear when this is going to happen or when it started. I posted about Verizon beginning this transition back in May of 2016: Changes...
This morning, CSO and MacKeeper published joint articles on a massive data leak from a marketing company. (Update: 2019: both articles are gone, a cached version of the CSOnline link is at ) This company, River City Media (RCM), failed to put a password on their online backups sometime. This leaked all of the company’s data out to the Internet at large. MacKeeper Security Researcher, Chris...
Happy March! As always, I blogged about best practices with subscriptions, and shared a great example of subscription transparency that I received from The Guardian. I also wrote about what happens to the small pool of people who fail to complete a confirmed opt-in (or double opt-in) subscription process. While there are many reasons that someone might not complete that process, ultimately that...
We’re back at work after a trip to M3AAWG. This conference was a little different for me than previous ones. I spent a lot of time just talking with people – about email, about abuse, about the industry, about the ecosystem. Sometimes when you’re in a position like mine, you get focused way too much on the trees. Of course, it’s the focusing on the trees that makes me good...
One of the things that regularly happens at email conferences is a bunch of representatives from various ISPs and sometimes deliverability companies get up on stage and entertain questions from the audience about how to get email to the inbox. I’ve sat in many of these sessions – on both sides of the stage. The questions are completely predictable. Almost invariably, someone asks if...
Many years ago, back when huge levels of spam involved hundreds of thousands of emails, there was a group of people who spent a lot of time talking about what to do about abuse. One of the distinctions we made was abuse of the net as opposed to abuse on the net. We were looking at abuse of the network, that is activity that made the internet less useable. At the time abuse of the network was...
That time of year when my friends and colleagues join the annual migration to San Francisco for 3 days and 4 nights of messaging, mobile, malware, and midnight meetings. We’re headed up to the conference later today. Do stop by and say hi!
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