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.
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Yahoo seems to be having some massive system issues the last 24 hours or so. DNS has been down, mail was down. I’m seeing reports things are coming back now, but there’s a lot of backed up mail traffic and the congestion may take a few hours to resolve. If you have the ability to do traffic shaping on the sending end, now would be a good time to be extra conservative in your sending...
One of the ongoing arguments in deliverability is whether or not to use no-reply in the From address of email marketing. There are very strong opinions on both sides. I’ve even had people ask me to comment or ask me to back up their particular point of view. My point of view is pretty simple. This is a customer relationship issue not a delivery issue. The presence of a no-reply@ address in...
Over the last few weeks I’ve had a lot of discussions with folks about DMARC and the very slow adoption. A big upsurge and multiple Facebook discussions were triggered by the ZDNet article DMARCs abysmal adoption explains why email spoofing is still a thing. There are a lot of reasons DMARC’s adoption has been slow, and I’m working on a more comprehensive discussion. But one of...
A few days ago Cox disabled email address account creation for their domain. In recent years, fewer customers have taken advantage of a Cox Email account, so we decided to modify our email service to better serve our customers. As of August 15, 2019, Cox no longer offers the ability for new and existing Cox Internet customers to create new Cox Email accounts. Customers with Cox Email accounts...
A few ISPs use the d= value in the DKIM signature as a way to provide FBL and reputation data to senders. This has some good bits, in that senders can get FBLs and other information regardless of the IP address they’re using and whether or not they have sole access to it. There are also some challenges with using the d= as a data identifier. One of them is that ESPs may not be able to get a...
It’s not too difficult to build your own link redirector, perhaps a few hours work for a basic implementationme, yesterday Yesterday I suggested that link tracking wasn’t too complex, but didn’t really have anything to back the claim up. And nobody trusts developer time estimates. So I cranked DEF CON Radio and wrote a dedicated click-tracking webserver, mostly as a demo of how to use...
Almost every bulk mail sent includes some sort of instrumentation to track which users click on which links and when. That’s usually done by the ESP rewriting links in the content so they point at the ESP’s tracking server, and include information about the customer, campaign and recipient. The recipient clicks on the link in the email, their web browser fetches the link from the...
Today Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign sued Google for $50 million. Why? Because during the night of the first debate Google disabled her “advertising account” (I’m assuming she means adwords) preventing her from being able to purchase ads to direct searchers to her website. There’s also a paragraph in there that they’re “disproportionally putting her email into...
Blogging has been a major part of our outreach and education here at WttW. It’s also the place where I work through some of my ideas. Most of what I do, particularly these days, is education. That means I need to be able to clearly model things in my head and explain that model to other folks. I work out a lot of the models and language here on the blog. Many times I think best through my...
Late last night folks started mentioning they were seeing data trickled into Google Postmaster tools. This morning, some of the domains for some of my clients are showing data.
Things aren’t fully back to normal, some of my clients are still showing no data for the last week. But things are getting back to normal and it looks like we will have older data.
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