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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Back in 2014, Steve wrote an article discussing Shiva Ayyadurai,and his claims that he was the inventor of email. In that article he links to a number of articles from Techdirt. Earlier this year, Shiva sued Floor64, the parent company of Techdirt, as well as Michael Massnick the Founder, CEO and editor and Leigh Beadon, a writer for Techdirt. (Original Complaint pdf from ReCAP). Ars Technica has...
Lately I’m hearing a lot of people talk about delivery problems at Gmail. I’ve written quite a bit about Gmail (Another way Gmail is different, Gmail filtering in a nutshell, Poor delivery at Gmail but no where else, Insight into Gmail filtering) over the last year and a half or so. But those articles all focus on different parts of Gmail delivery and it’s probably time for a...
Happy Labor Day! Celebrate it with the perfect email-themed cocktail – a spam-infused Mai Tai, served in the traditional glass. A speciality of the Duck Inn in Chicago, it’s made from a fat-washed dark rum: Slice Spam thin and lay the slices onto a small sheet pan. Cover with 5oz of melted lard. Bake at 250 degrees for one hour, or until the Spam is thoroughly browned. Fine strain...
August 2017 marks 10 years of blogging. In that time we’ve written almost 2200 posts. We’ve had millions of visitors. My first blog post was a bit of a cliche. The first real content on the blog was a post about the 7th circuit court of appeals ruling in the E360 v. Spamhaus lawsuit. I continued following that case for the next 4 years as various arguments, filings, and rulings were...
Well, not exactly mandatory but Chrome will start labeling any text or email form field on a non-TLS page as “NOT SECURE”. Chrome 62 will be released as stable some time around October 24th. If you want to avoid the customer support overhead then, regardless of whether any of the information on a form is sensitive, you should probably make sure that all your forms are accessible via...
In April of last year I created a new twitter account. I can’t remember exactly why, but it was a throwaway created to look at some aspect of how twitter interacts with new accounts. As part of the account creation process I gave Twitter an email address. They sent me a confirmation message right away: I didn’t click the button. Four months later they sent me another confirmation...
An email address has two main parts. The local-part is the bit before the @-sign and the domain is the bit after it. Loosely, the domain part tells SMTP how to get an email to the destination mailserver while the local part tells that server whose mailbox to put it in. I’m just looking at the local part today, the “steve” in “steve@example.com”. Talkin’...
Blogging will be light through the end of the month. We’re headed to Wyoming to see the eclipse this weekend. As well, with all of the current political events happening it’s hard to focus on email right now. So basically I’m giving myself permission to not blog daily through the end of August. I’ll blog as I have stuff to say. Some of those might be copies and pastes from...
A few months ago I was talking about different mailbox tools and mentioned email addresses are the keys to our online identity. They are, email addresses are the magic key that authenticates us and opens access to different accounts. The bad guys know this too. The Justice department recently announced a plea deal related to compromised email accounts. The individual in question gained access to...
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