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

July 2016: The Month in Email

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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...

The history of email

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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...

Changing deliverability thinking

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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...

Brief blogging break

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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.
 

Working around email security

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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...

SPF ?all

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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...

Do you know where your signups are?

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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...

Electronic records outside US not covered by US warrants

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The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Government today in US Government vs. Microsoft. The government is investigating a drug dealer and want access to records held by Microsoft. Microsoft turned over metadata stored on US machines. But they refused to turn over the specific emails stored on machines in Dublin. The company’s position is that the federal government needs to...

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