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

Gmail suddenly puts mail in the bulk folder

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One of the delivery challenges that regularly comes up in various delivery discussion spaces is the “Gmail suddenly put my mail in spam.” From my perspective, there is rarely a “suddenly” about Gmail’s decision making process. As I was answering one of these questions I had a number of thoughts. I’ll share them here on the blog so I can find them in the future...

TLS and Gmail delivery

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I’m seeing some questions about TLS and Gmail. Folks are seeing a correlation between sending without TLS and the mail going to bulk.

Has anyone seen this? Are you sending mail with TLS and can’t get to the inbox? Or are you sending mail without TLS and getting to the inbox?

Inquiring minds and all that.

Low bounce rates don’t mean a list is good

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Many people believe that if they remove non-existent addresses from their mailing lists that their lists will make it to the inbox without a problem. In fact, an entire industry has grown up around the idea that sending mail to valid addresses can never be spam. This isn’t true, of course, spammers use many of the same techniques legitimate mailers do to clean their lists. I don’t...

Explicit consent

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I’m working on a blog post about correlation and causation and how cleaning a list doesn’t make it opt-in and permission isn’t actually as outdated as many think and is still important when it comes to delivery. Today is a hard-to-word day, so I headed over to twitter. Only to find someone in my personal network re-tweeted this: Don't add professional contacts to newsletter...

Delivery is not dependent on authentication

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All too often folks come to me with delivery problems and lead off with all of the things they’ve done to send mail right. They assure me they’re using SPF and DKIM and DMARC and they can’t understand why things are bad. There is this pervasive belief that if you do all the technical things right then you will reach the inbox. Getting the technical bits right is an important...

The many meanings of opt-in

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An email address was entered into our website An email address was associated with a purchase on our website. We have a relationship with a 3rd party that shares email addresses with us. We have a cookie on a web browser that visited out website and we sent an email to the address associated with that cookie. We both went to the same conference and the attendee list was given to every exhibitor...

Email filters and small sends

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Have you heard about the Baader-Meinhoff effect? The Baader-Meinhof effect, also known as frequency illusion, is the illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias). Baader–Meinhof effect at Wikipedia There has to...

Shared environments

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In the email system there are all sorts of different belief systems. One contingent will have you believe that IP reputation is the be all and end all of delivery. Get a decent IP reputation, and the clouds will part, angels will sing and your mail will reach the inbox. This group of folks often recommends every sender should have their own dedicated IP address. Anything less is just admitting...

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