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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Marketers have a thing about transactional mail. In the US, transactional mail is exempt from many of the CAN SPAM regulations. If they label a mail transactional, then they can send it even when the recipient has opted-out! The smart marketer looks for opportunities to send transactional mail so they can bother spam get their brand in front of people who’ve opted out. Enter the...
The MAAWG conference was held in Brooklyn a few weeks ago. Many positive discussions and sessions happened at the conference. But there was an incident of harassment during the conference where one participant assaulted multiple other attendees during late evening activities. I’m not going to speak too much to what happened as I wasn’t there. What I will say is that I am proud of my...
I wear a number of hats and have a lot of different email addresses. I like to keep the different email addresses separate from each other, “don’t cross the streams” as it were. Recently I’ve been getting spam to my womenofemail.org address asking about the wordtothewise.com website. I’m not sure where Ms. Catherine Metcalf bought my Women of Email address or...
A few days ago Laura noticed a bug in one of our in-house tools – it was sometimes marking an email as SPF Neutral when it should have been a valid SPF pass. I got around to debugging it today and traced it back to a bug in the Go standard library. A DNS TXT record seems pretty simple. You lookup a hostname, you get some strings back. Those strings can be used for all sorts of things, but...
One of the consequences of moving to Ireland is I’m unsubscribing from most commercial mail, including some lists I’ve been on for a decade or more. Sadly, many of the companies don’t ship to Ireland, or their shipping costs are prohibitively expensive. Even if I wanted to purchase from them, I couldn’t. This process has made me realise how horrible many company’s...
Over the last few months I’ve gotten an increasing number of questions about the Spamhaus DBL. So it’s probably time to do a blog post about it. Last year I wrote about the DBL: DBL is the Domain Block List. It lists domains and not IP addresses. I’ll be honest, I don’t have as much experience with the DBL as with other lists, but I have had a few clients on the DBL. DBL is tied into...
Woke up this morning to the news that Sendgrid has been acquired by Twilio in an all stock deal. This fills a gap in Twilio’s platform, they didn’t seem to have any email capability before. I’m wondering how this will shake out in the broader email industry. Sendgrid is one of the biggest providers of SMTP services and have a significant customer base. I’ve worked with a...
I’m thinking I may need to deploy DMARC report automation sooner rather than later.
… and so on, and on, and on for a lot further down the mailbox.
I blogged a few times recently about Zoho and their issues with malicious actors abusing their platform. They asked me to post the following statement from their CEO Sridhar Vembu. Unfortunately phishing has become one of the bad side-effects of Zoho’s rapid growth over the last couple of years, especially the growth of our mail service. Since Zoho Mail offers the most generous free...
It’s M3AAWG time. Even though we’re not there, I’m getting regular updates from friends and colleagues who are there. Yesterday, was the presentation of the 2018 JD Falk award. The award recognises “a particularly meritorious project undertaken by a dedicated individual or group reflecting the spirit of volunteerism and community building.” In this case, the award...
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