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.
I know a lot of folks working at ESPs. For those I know well, I will usually send in reports. Sometimes they’re not spam reports per se. Often it’s just “hey, this sender shouldn’t have my address, might want to poke them.” Sometimes it’s even more specific. A few years ago I spoke at a user conference for an ESP. I stayed at the hotel for one night, and the...
I’ve got multiple clients right now looking for insights about bounce handling. This means I’m doing a lot of thought work about bounces and what they mean and how they match up and how different ISPs manage delivery and how different ESPs manage delivery and how it all fits together. One thing I’ve been trying to do is contextualize bounces based on what the reason is. Despite...
Today AWeber published a link to 11 innovators in email marketing. I’m honored to be one of them. I don’t really think of myself as a marketer, I’m a delivery person. My job, really, is to help clients devise email strategies (and overall digital marketing strategies) that result in inbox delivery. When I started, there were some significant divides between email marketing and...
Today the US government unsealed an indictment against 2 Russian agents and 2 hackers for breaking into Yahoo’s servers and stealing personal information. The information gathered during the hack was used to target government officials, security employees and private individuals. Email is so central to our online identity. Compromise an email account and you can get access to social media...
I saw a headline today: New Research from Return Path Shows Strong Correlation Between Subscriber Engagement and Spam Placement I have to admit, my first reaction was “Uh, Yeah.” But then I realized that there are some email marketers who do not believe engagement is important for email deliverability. This is exactly the report they need to read. It lays out the factors that ISPs...
Last week the CRTC published a CASL enforcement action wherein they fined an individual $15,000 for 10 violations of the act. The Commission imposes an administrative monetary penalty of $15,000 on William Rapanos for 10 violations of section 6 of Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation. Specifically, Mr. Rapanos sent commercial electronic messages (i) that did not identify the sender, (ii) that did not...
In my previous career I studied the effect of alcohol on developing embryos. It’s a bit weird I ended up in that field because embryological development always seemed to complex to me. And it was and is complicated. In a lot of ways, though, it was good training for deliverability. We dealt with a lot of processes that seem, on the surface, straightforward. Fertilization happens, then you...
Today is International Women’s Day. In recognition of this day, there has been a call for a general woman’s strike. I thought long and hard about how I would participate in this event. Even yesterday I had no clear view of whether or not I would be working today. As a self-employed woman, me not working today only hurts me and my clients. There’s no one to leave work for, I...
Yesterday there was a lot of talk about Verizon moving out of email and transitioning all their customers over to the AOL backend. The source was a page in the Verizon help center about transitioning an email address. There is no date on the page, so it’s unclear when this is going to happen or when it started. I posted about Verizon beginning this transition back in May of 2016: Changes...
This morning, CSO and MacKeeper published joint articles on a massive data leak from a marketing company. (Update: 2019: both articles are gone, a cached version of the CSOnline link is at ) This company, River City Media (RCM), failed to put a password on their online backups sometime. This leaked all of the company’s data out to the Internet at large. MacKeeper Security Researcher, Chris...
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