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

DMARC p=reject

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Mail.ru is switching to p=reject. This means that you should special-case mail.ru wherever … Actually, no. Time to change that script. If you operate an ESP or develop mailing list software you should be checking whether the email address that is being used in the From: address of email you’re sending is in a domain that’s publishing p=reject (is a “rejective” email...

Prepping for EEC

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Tomorrow I head off to New Orleans to the EEC conference. It’s my first one and I’m really looking forward to meeting some of the people I only know online. I’ll be speaking on two panels on Friday: All You Ever Wanted to Know about Deliverability (But Were Afraid to Ask) at 10:50. This is your chance to ask those questions of myself and other experts in the field. I always...

Ask Laura: Do I have to publish DMARC?

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  Dear Laura, I heard recently that both Gmail and Yahoo will require DMARC authentication in early 2016 or images will be automatically blocked. Is that correct? And if so, do you know when they will be requiring DMARC? A DMARC-Overwhelmed Admin Dear Overwhelmed, There are three things going on here, all of which are related to DMARC but are very different in how it affects mail delivery...

Foundation: A toolkit for designing responsive emails

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Zurb announced today version 2 of “Foundation for Email”, a full stack for designing content for responsive email. It looks rather nice, with features a modern web developer might look for when working on email content. It has many of the things you’d expect a web design stack to have. It support SASS for styling, includes browser sync for previewing content as it’s...

More Yahoo domains get DMARC'd

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Yahoo is turning on p=reject for 62 of their international domains on March 28, 2016. These domains include: y7mail.com yahoo.at yahoo.be yahoo.bg yahoo.cl yahoo.co.hu yahoo.co.id yahoo.co.il yahoo.co.kr yahoo.co.th yahoo.co.za yahoo.com.co yahoo.com.hr yahoo.com.my yahoo.com.pe yahoo.com.ph yahoo.com.sg yahoo.com.tr yahoo.com.tw yahoo.com.ua yahoo.com.ve yahoo.com.vn yahoo.cz yahoo.dk yahoo.ee...

Ugg, a spammer.

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I’ve written before about how there is some (I’m sure lovely) woman in the UK who has been connected to my email address. I get a lot of mail for her. Mostly spam. She doesn’t seem to be using the address, but I regularly get mail addressed to MRS. LAURA CORBISHLEY (all caps, always). Typically these messages are advertising various UK stores and products. Sometimes...

HE.net DNS problems

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Hurricane Electric had a significant outage of their authoritative DNS servers this morning, causing them to return valid responses with no results for all(?) queries. This will have caused delivery problems for any mail going to domains using HE.net DNS – which will include some of their colocation customers, as well as users of their free services – but also will have caused reverse...

Optimize your SPF records

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I talked on Monday about the SPF rule of ten and how it made it difficult for companies to use multiple services that send email on their behalf. Today I’m going to look at how to fix things, by shrinking bloated SPF records. This is mostly aimed at those services who send email on their customers behalf and ask their customers to include an SPF record as that’s the biggest pain...

Email nightmare for some FSU students

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I mentioned yesterday that sometimes people and software screw up in ways that cause problems. Today I saw an article demonstrating just how bad these issues can be. Florida State University Housing Department sent detailed and confidential violation reports to tens of thousands of students. On Monday, March 14 at around 2 p.m., FSU first became aware that a glitch in the University Housing...

The Internet is hard.

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There are so many things that need to happen to make the Internet work. DNS entries need to be right. MXs need to be set up. Web servers need to be configured. And, let’s be honest, anyone who has ever run their own services on the Internet has flubbed a configuration. We don’t think about it, because most of the time the configurations are handled by scripts and they do things right...

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