Isn’t August the month where things are supposed to slow down? We’re still waiting for that to happen around here… it’s been great to be busy, but we’re hoping to continue to carve out more time for blogging as we move into the fall. As usual, we reported on a mix of industry trends and news, the persistence of spam, and did a deep dive into an interesting technical topic. Let’s start there:...
The history of long distance communication is a fascinating, and huge, subject. I’m going to focus just on the history of network email – otherwise I’m going to get distracted by AUTODIN and semaphore and facsimile and all sorts of other telegraphy. Electronic messaging between users on the same timesharing computer was developed fairly soon after time-sharing computer systems...
Many aspects of email are a lot older than you may think. There were quite a few people in the early 1970s working out how to provide useful services using ARPANET, the network that evolved over the next 10 or 15 years into the modern Internet. They used Requests for Comment (RFCs) to document protocol and research, much as is still done today. Here are some of the interesting milestones. April...
One of the more frequent questions I get that I can’t answer is how to design a good email. Design is just not my strong point and outside actually getting the HTML right, what an email looks like doesn’t have a whole lot to do with delivery. It was pointed out to me today that the nice people over at Mailchimp have a resource page for designing emails. It’s a good mix of...
A couple weeks ago, I published a blog post about monetizing the complaint stream. The premise was that ESPs could offer lower base rates for sending if the customer agreed to pay per complaint. The idea came to me while talking with a deliverability expert at a major ESP. One of their potential customer wanted the ESP to allow them to mail purchased lists. The customer even offered to indemnify...
Fastcompany reports that AOL has a new webmail client “Alto” that changes how email is read and received. Alto is divided into two main windows: a streamlined column of mail that matters, and a grid of tiles for navigating leftover inbox clutter. In Alto, many messages and files are automatically and neatly aggregated into tiles of common categories: for photos, attachments, social...
I hear a lot of people claim that spam isn’t really a problem any more. That filters are so good that the average user doesn’t see a lot of spam and if they do get “legitimate” mail that they can just opt out. These are great sounding arguments, the problem is that those arguments aren’t always true. There is an address I stopped using for commercial mail around 1997...
The arrival of my first spam email was a bit of a shock. I’d been on the internet for years by that point and had never seen junk mail in my inbox. Of course, the Internet was a very different place. The web was still a toddler. There was no email marketing industry. In fact, there wasn’t much commerce on the web at all. Much of the “surfing” I did was using gopher and ftp...
Gmail recently started accepting mail (and calendar invitations) with non-Latin characters. A lot of fraudulent emails use non-Latin characters as a way to fool users. Google is on top of these security issues, however, and is now throwing away some mail with non-Latin characters. the Unicode community has identified suspicious combinations of letters that could be misleading, and Gmail will now...
J.D. Falk was one of the first names I encountered when learning how to read headers and report spam back in the mid-90s. He was one of the folks leading the fight against spam and actively trying to improve the Internet. When I was hired by MAPS I got to work with J.D. and a number of other big-names. One of the things that really surprised me was that this “internet elder” I had...
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