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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While I was doing some research for a client today I rediscovered Terry Zink’s blog. Terry is one of the MS email folks and he regularly blogs about the things MS is doing with Outlook.com and Office 365. The post that caught my eye was discussing the Microsoft Spam Fighter program. The short version is that in order to train their spam filters, Microsoft asks a random cross-section of...
Our first real company purchase was a big. solid pair of desks. See, we owed a lot of money to the IRS, but if we bought some equipment we could decrease the amount we had to pay the IRS. So we invested in very nice, wooden desks that would hold heavy CRT monitors. Things have changed over the years and we don’t have CRTs any more. And maybe it’s time to upgrade or replace our desks...
Happy October! ‘Tis the season for “the scariest costumes to wear to an inbound marketing Halloween party”. Terrifying, right? A perfect occasion for spam-infused mai tais! In other news from the blog in September, I wrote several posts about the Equifax breach, starting with the announcement of the compromise on September 7th and their utterly inadequate response, followed by more incompetence...
Had an all too short trip to M3AAWG. It was great to see old friends and meet new folks. I have lots to talk about and a poll to get into the field once I get caught up on client work. While I’m deep in the depths of my inbox, I thought I’d share a bit of insight into the question of new domain vs. subdomain that often comes up. I can’t stress this enough. subdomain.example.com...
I’ll be up in Toronto Tuesday and part of Wednesday for the M3AAWG meeting. If you’re there, say HI!
Getting to the Gmail inbox in concept is simple: send mail people want to receive. For a well established mail program with warm IPs and domains, getting to the inbox in practice is simple. Gmail uses recipient interaction with email to determine if an email is wanted or not. These interactions are easy when mail is delivered to the inbox, even if the user has tabs enabled. When mail is in the...
We just bought some new desks, to replace the old ones that date back to the days of CRT monitors. The supplier we bought them from, Autonomous, did a nice set of triggered sends throughout the sales process – “we’ve received your order”, “we’ve shipped your order”, “your order has been delivered”. That’s not rocket science – you...
A bit of a refresh of a post from 2011: Six best practices for every mailer. I still think best practices are primarily technical and that how senders present themselves to recipients is more about messaging and branding than best practices. These 6 best practices from 2011 are no longer best, these days, they’re the absolute minimum practices for senders. If you can’t manage to do...
One challenge when implementing DMARC is to ensure that all mail, and I do mean ALL mail is authenticated correctly, before switching to a p=reject notice. The easiest way to do this is to set up a p=none record and check reports to see what mail isn’t authenticated. At least some of this mail is actually going to be valid but unauthenticated email. I regularly recommend monitoring for 6...
Earlier this month I wrote about how we can’t trust Equifax with our personal data. I’m not sure we can trust them with a cotton ball. Today, we discover Equifax has been sending consumers worried about their personal information leaking to the wrong site. [O]n multiple occasions over the span of weeks, the company’s official Twitter account responded to customer inquiries by...
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