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...
Spamcop mail changes
Spamcop is shutting down it’s email service. While anyone could report spam using Spamcop, the system also provided users email addresses behind the Spamcop filters. This shut down should have no major impact on senders. Email addresses in use will still be accepting email, but that mail will simply be forwarded to another address, instead of users being able to access it through POP or...
What about the bots?
M3AAWG published a letter to the FCC addressing the implementation of CSRIC III Cybersecurity Best Practices (pdf link) The takeaway is that of the ISPs that contribute data to M3AAWG (37M+ users), over 99% of infected users receive notification that they are infected. I hear from senders occasionally that they are not the problem, bots are the problem and why isn’t anyone addressing bots...
B2B email filtering
I’ve written about B2B filtering in the past, but I don’t blog too much about corporate filtering overall. The reason for this is that the corporate landscape is a lot broader and less consistent than the consumer space. That makes it much more difficult to tell senders how to handle corporate filtering, because each corporation is different. But as I think I about it, I realize...