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.
It’s the beginning of a new year and everyone is breaking out posts either reviewing the previous year or making predictions for the next year. I’ve done both over the years. 2018 brought us a couple major things in email. The biggest change was the European General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) came into effect in May. The regulation date drove huge volumes of email throughout...
If your mail goes back to spam within a month of “fixing” a delivery problem, then you never really fixed the problem. You just evaded filters for a short time. The filters caught up and the problem is definitely your mail.
Lots of reports today about mail being delivered to unusual tabs today. Mail that normally goes to promotions is in updates, updates are in the inbox, things like that.
It’s not just you.
Update: The Washington Post reported on the bug.
In the wake of GDPR, public whois records are 100% redacted. There is lots of work going on to attempt to provide the data without violating privacy laws, but no one is there yet. This came up because today I got email from Tucows asking me to verify and, if necessary, update my whois data. Now, Tucows is the registrar, so they know all of the data. But they sent me thisGee, thanks. That’s...
No matter how great an email program deliverability is, no one can guarantee that 100% of the email sent will reach the recipient’s inbox. Why? Recipients can make decisions about where mail goes in their own inbox. Every mail client has a way for users to control where mail is delivered. This is good for delivery, when the mail means so much to people that they override spam filters and...
In 2010 Chad White declared best practices dead. Frankly, the term has always been too “big tent” to be truly useful. When “don’t buy email lists” and “use buttons for primary calls-to-action” are both best practices, it’s no wonder there’s confusion. What we need is new language that differentiates those practices that are a litmus test for...
Anecdotally I’m hearing a few different things about recent mail sends. Multiple ESPs are reporting that their customers, combined, sent more than 2 Billion emails on Friday. SendGrid was close to 3 Billion. Mailchimp was over 2 billion. When all is said and done, I wouldn’t be surprised if the final volume totals topped 20 billion emails in a single day. One person reported they went...
Last year a number of ISPs mentioned the Black Friday email volume was congesting their systems and causing delays. While anecdotally it seems that volume is up over last year I also haven’t heard any ISPs talking about congestion. Likewise, most of the delivery folks I’ve spoken too today and over the weekend are saying there were no major problems. How’d the busiest email...
It’s rare I find mail that violates the SMTP spec (rfc5321 and rfc5322). I’ve even considered removing “send mail from a correctly configured mail server” from my standard Best Practices litany. But today I got mail asking me to respond to a survey. This whole email is a mess of problems, and it’s claiming to be from the California Secretary of State. It’s...
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