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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AOL has disabled the IP reputation check and the rDNS lookup on their postmaster pages. Given AOL isn’t handling the first mail hop any longer, this makes perfect sense. They simply don’t have the kind of data they did when they were handling mail directly from the sender MTA. There’s no information, yet, on whether or not that functionality will be added / replicated over at...
Today I was chatting with a potential client who is in the middle of a frustrating warmup at Gmail. They’re doing absolutely the right things, it’s just taking longer than anyone wants. That’s kinda how it is with Gmail, while their algorithm can adapt quickly to changes. Sometimes, like when you’re warming up or trying to change a bad reputation, it can take 3 – 4...
I got a piece of B2B spam last week that showed in several different ways why spam isn’t going away any time soon. Systemic problems dealing with abuse at scale at Google. Ethics problems at Cloudflare. Problems dealing with abuse at scale at Amazon. Cultural problems in India, several times over. Buckle up. The spam content The spam email itself looks pretty much like any business email...
The Yahoo bounce problem has been resolved. There were erroneous ‘554: this user does not have a yahoo.com account’ between March 14 and March 16. If you attempted to send mail and received this bounce during that time you can reactivate the address in your database. Most ESPs should be able to help you with this. Moving forward, though, these bounces are valid and addresses should be...
I’ve had a lot less opportunity to blog at the recent M3AAWG conference than I expected. Some of it because of the great content and conversations. Another piece has to do with lack of time and focus to edit and refine a longer post prompted by the conference. The final issue is the confidential nature of what we talk about. With that being said, I can talk about a discussion I had with...
I still don’t have any solid information on the cause of the Yahoo bounces. I do know that folks inside Yahoo are looking into the issue. However, multiple people (including my clients) are reporting that the addresses that are bouncing have very recent click and open activity. Other reports say these addresses deliver on a resend. It looks like my advice yesterday was incorrect. I’m...
Multiple folks are mentioning seeing an increase in “user unknown” responses from Yahoo. Some people are discussing this with Yahoo.
Right now, best advice is to believe these are accurate user unknowns. UPDATE: There is increasing evidence these are not valid user unknowns. See next post.
ActiveCampaign is hosting their very first user conference in Chicago in June. I am honored to be a part of their speaker lineup.
Early bird registration only $450 through April 30.
It’s International Women’s Day, and I thought I’d take a moment to mention some of the many, many women who have inspired me and helped me along the way. Some of them work in deliverability and compliance. Others are business colleagues. Still others are cheerleaders and inspiration. All of them make the world a better place. Jen April Kristin Kelly Judith Mary Heather Skyler...
Today I was discussing some mailing list posts with an ESP colleague. He was telling me some interesting numbers he’d collected from different IP pools they maintain. He was testing routing mail through IPs based on subscription process and routing based on engagement metrics. The data showed that inboxing rates were similar across the test groups. As he put it, “IP reputation...
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