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.
Next month I’ll be in London for the Email Innovations Summit. This will be an updated version of what you need to know to talk with technical folks. In early December I’ll be doing a DMA webinar discussing the subscription bombings. That’s still in the works. I’m looking at some events for next year. I am planning on being at M3AAWG in San Francisco in February. I’m...
Last week Spamhaus posted information on the ongoing subscription attacks. They provided a more information about them that was not make public previously, including some information about the volume of mail some targets received. Today SendGrid also blogged about this, going into a little more detail about why senders should care about this. They also provided a number of suggestions for how to...
Spamhaus released a blog post today discussing the recent subscription bombing: Subscription bombing COI captcha and the next generation of mail bombs. As I mentioned in my initial posts, this abusive behavior goes beyond spamming. This is using email to harass individuals. Spamhaus even mentions a potential service that can be used to do these kinds of mailbombing. Things folks need to know is...
There’s been extensive and ongoing development of email through the years, but much of it has been behind the scenes. We were focused on the technology and safety and robustness of the channel. We’re not done yet, but things are much better than they were. The good part of that is there is some space to make improvements to the inbox as well. Over the last few months there have been a...
Today Gmail announced they are supporting media queries in Gmail and Google Inbox. This should simplify the creation of emails for multiple platforms. The full list of supported rules can be found on the Google Developer Site.
At the beginning of the month Microsoft announced that they were deprecating the SmartScreen filters used by the desktop Microsoft mail clients. These are the filters used in Exchange and various version of Outlook mail. This is yet further consolidation of spam filtering between the Microsoft free webmail domains, Office365 hosted domains and self hosted Exchange servers. The online services...
More and more I’m moving away from consulting on technical setup issues as the solution to delivery problems. Delivery is not about the technical perfection of a message. Spammers get the technical right all the time. No, instead, delivery is about sending messages the user wants. While looking for something on the blog I found an old post from 2011 that’s still relevant today. In...
Dear Laura, Our company has been shopping around for ESPs and most of them want to put us on a shared IP address. I have always heard that senders should get dedicated IPs. Will this hurt our deliverability? Regards, Sharing is Hard Dear Sharing, For a long time, IP reputation was the major factor in identifying good mail from bad mail. Good IPs helped mail get into the inbox. Poor IPs were...
There are few address acquisition processes that make me cringe as badly as incentivized point of sale collection. Companies have tried many different ways to incentivize address collection at the point of sale. Some offer the benefit to the shopper, like offering discounts if they supply an email address. Some offer the benefits to the employee. Some offer punishments to the employee if they...
August was a busy month for both Word to the Wise and the larger world of email infrastructure. A significant subscription attack targeted .gov addresses, ESPs and over a hundred other industry targets. I wrote about it as it began, and Spamhaus chief executive Steve Linford weighed in in our comments thread. As it continued, we worked with M3AAWG and other industry leaders to share data and...
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