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

List-Unsub header

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Benjamin asked in the comments where in the interface the “unsubscribe” or “block” popup appeared. This is the dialog box Microsoft uses when the add the “unsubscribe here” link at the top of a message. Screenshots taken today from my Hotmail account: At this point we have 3 of the major webmail providers (Yahoo, Microsoft, Gmail) using List-Unsubscribe headers...

GDPR and Whois data

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For folks who aren’t following the discussion about whois records and GDPR compliance there’s a decent summary at vice.com: What Is Going to Happen With Whois? The problem, briefly stated, is that ICANN has agreements with the thousands of domain registrars around the globe like GoDaddy or HostGator which oblige the companies to post WHOIS data—such as names, emails, and phone...

Microsoft using the List-Unsubscribe header

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An interesting observation from Brian Curry about how Microsoft is using the List Unsubscribe header in their interface. The short version is that Microsoft is only supporting mailto: links. They’re ignoring any List-Unsubscribe links that are a URL. Here are some screenshots.  When the sender is using a List-Unsubscribe <; header, Microsoft states that there is no information on how to...

AOL MX Change update

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The AOL postmaster team posted some information about the upcoming MX transition on their blog. [S]tarting this week, the majority of AOL’s MX records will point to [OATH’s] new combined servers. This should be transparent to any sender as those servers will operate in simple pass-through mode. This means senders with established FBLs will continue to receive them from our AOL mail...

Collecting email addresses

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One of the primary ways to collect email addresses is from website visitors, and it’s actually a pretty good way to collect addresses. One of the more popular, and effective, techniques is through a pop-up window, asking for an address. Users need to provide an address or click a “no thanks” link or close the window. I’ve noticed, though, that many companies drop something...

Social media connections are not opt-ins

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It seems silly to have to say this, but connecting on social media is not permission to add an address to your newsletter or mailing list or prospecting list or spam list. Back in 2016, I wrote: [Scraping addresses from LinkedIn] is really rude. Just because someone accepted your contact request on LinkedIn, doesn’t mean they want to be added to any mailing lists you may have. Let’s be honest...

Still with the Microsoft problems

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We took a quick trip to Dublin last week. I had every intention of blogging while on the trip, but… oops. I did get to meet with some clients, and had a great dinner while discussing email and delivery. Coming back, I see a lot of folks still reporting delivery problems to Microsoft properties. I’ve been operating under the assumption this was temporary as kinks were worked out after...

AOL Changes

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We’ve known for a while that AOL email infrastructure is going to be merging with Yahoo’s, but apparently it’s happening sooner than anyone expected. The MXes for aol.com will be migrated to Yahoo infrastructure around February 1st. Reading between the lines I expect that this isn’t a flag day, and much of the rest of the AOL email infrastructure will be in use for a while...

Tempo

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When we say that you might just be sending too much email and fatiguing or annoying the recipient into unsubscribing or hitting spam, this is the sort of thing we mean. Three emails (to the same email address) in four minutes might be a bit much. If you can’t combine the content you want to send into a single personalized email, maybe spread deliveries out a bit? Or even not send all of it...

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