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’ve been seeing reports for the last few weeks that a lot of folks are having problems getting mail into BT Internet. Many people are reporting the response smtp;554 Message rejected for policy reasons (3.2.2.1) – Please report any problems to BT via the postmaster btinternet.com mailbox and include your sending ip address with an example header of your email Unfortunately, the...
Setting up a DMARC record is the easy bit. Anyone can publish a record in DNS that will trigger reports to them. The challenge is what to do with those reports and now to manage them. DMARC is a complex protocol. It builds on two other protocols, each with their own nuances and implementation issues. I’ve written in the past about what DMARC is, what you need to know to decide if...
This popped up on my FB feed yesterday.
What say you? Do we need to create a major effort to improve online security? What challenges do you see to making it work?
Edit: After I published this, I found an article stating that 3.7 million people had their personal health information compromised in a recent attack.
We got to slow down — and even take a brief vacation — in July, but we still managed to do a bit of blogging here and there, which I’ll recap below in case you missed anything. At the beginning of the month, I wrote about email address harvesting from LinkedIn. As you might imagine, I’m not a fan. A permissioned relationship on social media does not equate to permission to email...
My first access to “the internet” was through a dialup modem on a VAX at the FDA. I was a summer intern there through my college career and then worked full time after graduation and before grad school. My email address ended in .bitnet. I could mail some places but not others. One of the places I couldn’t send mail was to my friends back on campus. A few of those friends were...
Almost every email marketing program, at least those sending millions of emails per campaign, have delivery problems at one time or another. The problems seem random and unpredictable. Thus most marketers think that they can only address delivery problems, they can’t prepare or prevent them. On the delivery side, though, we know deliverability problems are predictable. There are situations...
Sorry about the unexpected hiatus. I picked up a cold that really made me feel fuzzy and writing was an exercise in futility. I’ll be back Monday.
Meanwhile, Oracle bought another ESP (Bronto) when they bought NetSuite.
One of the common things I see as a delivery consultant is that companies do their best to set effective policies about email, but make it difficult to comply with those policies. It happens all the time. It’s one of the reasons that the tweets Steve shared about Sec. Clinton’s email server rang so true to me. One of the commenters on that post disagrees, and uses banks and health...
The most read post on the blog is Authenticating with SPF: -all or ~all. In fact, it’s in the top 5 posts every single day. We still get comments on it, too. Usually from folks who disagree with my recommendations. I still stand by my recommendations, though. It doesn’t really matter if you choose ~all or -all in your SPF records. Why? No major provider is rejecting mail solely...
Here at Word to the Wise we sign up for a lot of email from our customers. There are multiple reasons we do this. Engagement starts before the first email These days the key to getting to the inbox is sending mail your users want and expect. We always recommend senders start the engagement process during signup. Why? Because it establishes the relationship even before email happens. People want...
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