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

Spam-infused Mai-Tai

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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...

A decade of blogging

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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...

Mandatory TLS is coming

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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...

Maybe they're just not that into you?

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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...

Local-part Semantics

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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’...

August mini-recess

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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...

Email address as identity

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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...

Reengagement emails

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By default I don’t load images in email. For one thing it lets me see who is using open / click data to measure engagement. This morning I got a reengagement email from my Senator.  There are things I really like about this email and there are somethings I think they get a little wrong. The good This is a great subject line. I like the use of “ghosting” to describe what the...

State of Email Deliverability

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I had other posts in the pipeline, but saw a link to the Litmus 2017 State of Email Deliverability Report and decided that deserved a mention here. There’s all sorts of interesting data there, and well worth a download and read. I was, of course, interested in the “most problematic subscriber acquisition sources.” Senders having blocking issues or blacklist problems in the past...

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