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.
Sometimes I find it hard to find a new topic to write about. I decide I’m going to write about X and then realize I did, often more than once. Other times I think I can blog about some issue only to realize that it’s too complex to handle in a quick post. There are concepts or issues that need background or I have to work a little harder to explain them. One thing I haven’t...
We run a lot of our own infrastructure at Word to the Wise. Our email and web presence runs on our own hardware, in our own cabinet in our own network space. Partly that’s because we’re all from very technical backgrounds, and can run them in a way that’s better suited to our needs than an off-the-shelf web service. Partly it’s so we can do things like add instrumentation...
An email I received this morning got me thinking about how your domain name is one of the main ways you identify yourself if you’re sending email. We talk about domain reputation quite a lot – DKIM and SPF let a sender volunteer a domain name as a unique identifier for recipients to use to track reputation, DMARC allows them to tie that domain to the domain visible to the user in the...
Al over at SpamResource reports that the next generation of Apple’s iOS has support for the list unsubscribe header.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time an independent email client has built in support for the List-Unsubscribe header. Microsoft and Google support it, but only in their webmail system. Hopefully other mail clients will follow suit.
A question came up on a recent deliverability panel about role accounts. What is a role account? A role account is an email address that goes to a particular role or position rather than to a person. In many cases email to that address gets sent to a ticketing system or sent to multiple people. Sometimes the address does go to a single person. The point of role accounts is to have standardized...
Sanford Wallace has been sentenced to 2 years in jail by the US District court in San Jose for contempt of court and electronic mail fraud. Sanford has been around for more than 2 decades. He is one of the spammers that drove me to learn how to read headers and report spam back in the late nineties. Sanford has been in and out of courts and the news almost as long as he’s been spamming...
I wrote a few days ago about permission and how it was the key to getting into the inbox. It’s another one of those “necessary but not sufficient” parts of delivery. There are, however, a lot of companies who are using email without the recipient permission. These companies often contact me to help them solve their delivery problems. Often these are new companies who are trying...
Today marks the training day for M3AAWG 37 in Philly. With all the traveling and speaking I’ve been doing lately we’re not going to be there. So no tweeting from me about the conference. We’ve been attending various M3AAWG meetings since way early on – 2004? 2005? in San Diego. The organization has grown and matured and really come a long way since the early days. One of...
According to Adage and Return Path, Donald Trump’s mail campaign is not one to write home about. He’s not asking for donations and has a high rate of spam complaints.
Dear Laura, We have a real estate client who has asked us to include short video previews of houses in their weekly newsletters to prospective buyers. The videos are great — informative, well-produced, and they definitely meet your definition of wanted email, as subscribers have been asking for this content for a long time. Unfortunately, we are learning that many email service providers...
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