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

Barracuda problems

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Folks were posting earlier today noticing problems delivering to Barracuda hosted services. The good news is Barracuda has been updating their status page. As of now, the status page says things are improving. Monitoring – Since 7PM PDT 11/1/2016, the Barracuda Essentials for Email Security service has been experiencing a sustained and unusually large number of inbound connections from...

It's beginning to look a lot like…

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I had a call this morning discussing holiday email volumes. I think many consumers now expect the deluge of emails that start in early November. I’m not sure all of them want it, but I think they expect it. We’ll, of course, be writing more about holiday volumes, mailing issues and such through the end of the year. What are your plans for sending all the mail? How have experiences in...

Zombies are real but less of a problem

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A few years ago I wrote a series of blog posts about zombie email addresses. Zombie addresses are those that someone owned and used and interacted with, but for whatever reason stopped logging into and checking. This series started with the time before the zombies, and moved on to the zombie uprising. Then discussed how they don’t eat brains, but they do love to take a bite out of...

Another CASL fine assessed

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This week the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced a $50,000 fine against Blackstone Learning Corp. for violations of CASL. In early 2015, the CRTC identified over 380,000 emails sent without the consent of recipients and fined Blackstone $640,000. Blackstone appealed the ruling and the Commission lowered the fine to $50,000. I strongly recommend folks who...

Anatomy of a successful phishing attempt

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Earlier this year the Exploratorium was the victim of a phishing attack. They’ve posted an article on what happened and how they discovered and dealt with the issue. But they didn’t just report on the attack, they dissected it. And, as is appropriate for a organization with a mission of education, they mapped out what they discovered during the investigation. There are a couple of...

2016 J.D. Falk Award

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André Leduc received the 2016 J.D. Falk award this week at the Paris meeting of M3AAWG. He was recognized for spearheading two distinct projects. The first was the Operation Safety Net – Best Practices to Address Online, Mobile, and Telephony Threats  This 76 page report was written by global security experts. One of the major goals of the report was to discuss security in language accessible to...

And… we're back from London

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The Email Innovations Summit in London was a good conference. Much smaller than Vegas, but with a number of very interesting talks. I got to meet a number of folks I’ve only known online and we had some interesting conversations at the conference and at the pub-track in the evenings. I had so many grand plans for doing some work while in London. So many plans. And then I actually mostly...

Yahoo disabled forwarding

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Al posted about this over on his blog earlier this week. Yahoo has disabled the ability to forward email from one Yahoo account to an email account on a different system. There is, of course, all sorts of speculation as to why forwarding has been disabled including speculation this has to do with holding on to accounts during the Verizon purchase. It’s certainly possible this is the case...

Email Innovations Summit next week

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I’m headed to London this weekend to speak at the Email Innovations summit next Thursday. It will be an updated version of “How to Talk Tech for Marketers” that I debuted in Vegas earlier this year. Expect blogging to be light for the next 2 weeks while I’m gone. There are a few things I have to post, but I’m going to try and unplug and for part of the time I’m...

September 2016: The month in email

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Happy October, everyone. As we prepare to head to London for the Email Innovations Summit, we’re taking a look back at our busy September. As always, we welcome your feedback, questions, and amusing anecdotes. Seriously, we could use some amusing anecdotes. Or cat pictures.   We continued to discuss the ongoing abuse and the larger issues raised by attacks across the larger internet...

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