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.
I recently had a challenging travel experience in the Netherlands, trying to get from Schipol airport to a conference I was speaking at. As part of my attempt to get out of the airport, I installed UBER on my phone. There were some challenges with getting UBER to authorise my phone number, so I tried linking it to my Gmail account. I checked Gmail today and noticed there was a message from UBER...
Many questions about delivery problems often assume that there is one standard email filter and the rules are the same across all of them. Unfortunately, this isn’t really the case. The biggest divide is consumer versus business filters. Business filters don’t really care about things like engagement. A sender could have near perfect engagement with a message to a business. But a...
There are quite a lot of broken DNS servers out there. I’m sure that’s no surprise to you, but some of them might be yours. And you might not notice that until your domains stop working early next year. DNS is quite an old protocol, and when it was originally specified there wasn’t really a good way to extend the protocol to add new features. That was fixed about 19 years ago...
ZDnet reports that Zoho’s problems with phishing aren’t over. Their report states that Zoho is being used as a pipeline to exfiltrate data from phished accounts. The software platform’s email address service, on both zoho.com and zoho.eu domains, is being exploited in 40 percent of phishing campaigns in which email “is the primary exfiltration vehicle.” That’s...
The riskiest email to send is that very first email. It’s a blank slate. Even if you’re sending confirmation messages, you don’t really know anything about how this email is going to affect your reputation. It’s Schroedinger’s email. The address is both good and bad, until you send to it. If it’s good, great things will happen. You’ll be happy. The...
Last week, I talked about policy, using some different blocklist policies as examples. In that post I talked about how important it is that policy evolve. One example of that is how we’ve been evolving policy related to companies that get listed on Purchased Lists and ESPs. Who is listed has evolved over time, and we’re actually looking at some policy changes right now. Listing policy...
Being in infosec for so long takes its toll. I've come to the conclusion that if you give a data point to a company, they will eventually sell it, leak it, lose it or get hacked and relieved of it. There really don't seem to be any exceptions, and it gets depressing.
— briankrebs (@briankrebs) September 26, 2018
A particular blocklist, once again, listed a major ESP this week. Their justification is “this is our policy.” Which is true, it is their policy to list under these circumstances. That doesn’t make it a good policy, or even an effective policy. It’s simply a policy. Crafting policies Crafting good policy starts with the question “what is the desired outcome in this...
Yesterday the CRM system Zoho suffered an unexpected outage when their registrar, TierraNet suspended their domain. According to TechCrunch, Zoho’s CEO says there was no notification to the company and that the company had only 3 complaints about phishing. Based on the article, even as a Zoho customer, I am fully on the registrar’s side here. Every company, absolutely every company...
We’ve landed in Dublin and are back at work. Blogging will pick up as I get back into the swing of things. I’ll be speaking on a panel at the Selligent user conference in Amsterdam tomorrow and in London on Thursday. If you’re a Selligent customer, introduce yourself and say hi! Speaking of being on panels, I heard recently that some folks were adding conference speakers to...
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