Gmail announced today on their blog a new product “Inbox” to help make the inbox more useful and more of a center of activity. “We get more email now than ever, important information is buried inside messages, and our most important tasks can slip through the cracks—especially when we’re working on our phones. For many of us, dealing with email has become a daily chore that...
Bounces at Verizon
There have been lots of reports of Verizon rejecting valid email addresses for a few hours this morning. They seem to have fixed things now but you probably want to make sure you didn’t suppress those addresses.
M3AAWG Boston
The tri-annual procession of Facebook friends and colleagues to a disclosed location to talk about messaging, abuse and prevention started over the weekend. For me, this M³AAWG conference marks the beginning of a new chapter. We’re hiring, and even before the conference officially started I’ve had some productive conversations with people about what we’re looking for and how we...
We're growing… and hiring
The last year has been a time of growth here at Word to the Wise. You’ve seen some of this in our new website and branding. The result of this investment in the company has translated to more, and more interesting, consulting work. It’s possible you’ve noticed that I’ve not been blogging as much over the last couple months. Steve’s picked up the slack admirably and...
ISP filters are good for marketers
A throwback post from 2010 Attention is a limited resource. Marketing is all about grabbing attention. You can’t run a successful marketing program without first grabbing attention. But attention is a limited resource. There are only so many things a person can remember, focus on or interact with at any one time. In many marketing channels there is an outside limit on the amount of...
Does volume cause blocking?
There seems to be a never ending debate about volume and how it affects delivery and revenue. I regularly get questions asking if ISPs block senders just for volume. The answer is no. Unless you’re actually sending enough mail to overwhelm the incoming infrastructure, something that’s difficult on today’s internet, you’re unlikely to be blocked due to simply sending a high...
Yahoo.com on FCC wireless "do not mail" list
Update: As of mid-morning pacific time on 10/7 yahoo.com has been removed from the FCC list. As part of CAN SPAM the FCC maintains a list of wireless domains that require proof of permission to send mail to. Recently, various email folks noticed that yahoo.com was added to this list. According to the law, senders have 30 days to meet the permission standards for any recipients at domains on the...
Email marketing not dead yet
If Forrester research is to be believe, email marketing is feeling better. In fact, it seems email marketing is more effective than ever. Researchers at Forrester have found that attitudes to emails from brands are actually becoming more positive, despite the fact that most people tend to write them off as annoying “spam.” Business Insider attributes much of this change to the...
Marketing pet peeves
Loren McDonald has a great post over at Mediapost listing his email marketing pet peeves. I particularly love this because he includes those things annoy him as a subscriber. Most of what annoys me as a subscriber is sloppy marketing. Really is it so hard to actually check what you’re sending and who you’re sending it to? This was a notice from Ello telling me that they’d get to...
September 2014: The Month in Email
September was another busy month for us, but Steve stepped up and wrote a number of really interesting posts on email history, cryptography, and current technical issues in the email landscape. We started the month with a look at the various RFCs that served as the technical specifications for developing message transfer protocols in the 1970s. It’s really fascinating to look at the evolution of...