Word to the Wise

We make email better.

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We make email better.

Word to the Wise helps email marketers create more effective email messages, programs and infrastructures. We advise you how to skillfully navigate the constant business, technology, and policy challenges so your messages reach your customers.

We can help you with your email strategy, deliverability challenges and many other email issues.

Latest stories

What’s missing in MarTech?

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A few weeks ago, Kickbox asked me, and a bunch of other folks who know their stuff, what was missing in MarTech. Yesterday they published what we thought. Check out their blog post and see what folks had to say.

Email Deliverability Unfiltered: What’s missing in MarTech for deliverability?

Deliverability is nuanced

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The deliverability discussion calls are going well and I’m going continue to host them on a biweekly basis. Next call will be May 6th, 5pm Ireland time, noon Eastern and 9am Pacific time. Still doing invites manually, so drop me an email at laura-ddiscuss@ the obvious domain. A few weeks ago, the discussion entered around machine learning in general. As a follow on I’d planned to talk...

Deliverability Discussion #3

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Next deliverability discussion will be Wednesday April 22 at 5pm Ireland, Noon eastern, 9am pacific. As always, drop me a mail at laura-ddiscuss@ the obvious domain. I’m still thinking about the final topic. One of my ideas is a continuation of the machine learning discussion from last time. I think most large scale spam filters use ML for some parts of their filtering engine these days...

Machine learning resources

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Thanks to everyone who joined the deliverability discussion on Friday. I realised after I scheduled that it was Good Friday and that may have limited some folks’ ability to join. This call we talked about Machine Learning and how it is applied to spam filters. Before the call I put together some resources in a Google Doc and some participants added links and more information afterwards...

Spamhaus DBL errors

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Sometime in the last few days, Spamhaus seems to have started issuing a block message if someone queries the DBL with an IP address. folks started seeing an uptick in error messages that mention Spamhaus saying: 554 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [x.x.x.x] blocked using dbl.spamhaus.org; No IP queries, see (in reply to RCPT TO command)) Crowdsourcing information from the emailgeeks slack...

Whose side are you on?

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A few weeks ago I was on an industry call. We were discussing some changes coming down the pike at the ISPs and filter providers. These changes are going to cause some headache at ESPs and other places that do email but don’t provide mailboxes. During the call I ended up explaining why what the ISPs were doing made sense and how it fit in with their mission and customer needs. At one point...

Let’s do it again

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Given the success of our initial call, let’s try it again. This time Friday April 10, 5pm Ireland time, 12 noon Eastern and 9am Pacific. Same as before, send me an email to laura-ddiscuss@ the obvious domain and I’ll send you an invite. I’m trying to move the days around to catch folks who couldn’t make Wednesday. Potential topics: How do you learn the technical aspects of...

Misinformation on filters

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I’ve seen reports that someone is asserting that utm=COVID19 in URLs results in all mail going to bulk at multiple ISPs. This is the type of thing that someone says is true and dozens of folks believe it and thus a “deliverability phact” is born. For a plethora of reasons, this doesn’t pass the sniff test. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. It’s...

Discussion Session

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More than 30 people joined our delivery discussion from last Wednesday evening (Irish time). Thanks to all who joined and participated. I had a number of different topic suggestions, but the thing on everyone’s mind was the current pandemic and how much email many of our customers, clients, and companies are sending. We had what I think was a productive discussion sharing information and...

Deliverability discussion

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Lots of folks are socialising distantly these days, so I thought I’d try a scheduled deliverability discussion over video. Given the time difference, I’ll log on in the evening Irish time which makes this daytime for most of the US folks. The first call will be Wednesday, March 25, 2020 at 5pm Ireland time. That’s 1pm Eastern and 10am Pacific. If you’re interested in...

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