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.
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Spamhaus gave a bunch of us a preview of their new “Top 10 worst” (or should that be bottom 10?) lists at M3AAWG. These lists have now been released to the public. The categories they’re measuring are: Countries Spam ISPs Spammers Botnet Countries Botnet ISPs Botnet ASNs TLDs Nothing really surprising there, but it’s nice to see the numbers. I have to wonder if the listing...
Some mechanisms and modifiers (collectively, “terms”) cause DNS queries at the time of evaluation, and some do not. The following terms cause DNS queries: the “include”, “a”, “mx”, “ptr”, and “exists” mechanisms, and the “redirect” modifier. SPF implementations MUST limit the total number of those terms to 10...
Dear Laura, We’re a small ESP and as we onboard new clients, we often hear them ask “Why did I get better open rates with our previous provider? There has to be something wrong with your platform!” As part of the onboarding process, we meet with new clients to provide best practices and let them know they are building a reputation with ISPs on new IPs. We talk about how algorithms are...
“All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.” Mutt is a commandline mail client that’s been in use and been actively developed for about two decades. It’s considered by many to be the most powerful mail client available, particularly for handling large volumes of email. It’s weaknesses include poor rich text handling and desktop integration for attachment...
It’s sometimes hard for me to keep up with what other people are saying and discussing about email marketing. I’ve been trying to be more active on LinkedIn, but there are just so many good marketing and delivery blogs out there I can’t keep up with all of them. Here are a couple interesting things I’ve read in the last week. Five Steps to Stay Out of the Spam Folder...
What really are the best practices for email? A year ago I wrote a post about best practices and how most of my best practices were different from what other people recommend. I don’t talk about rules for frequency or subject line length. I don’t focus on best practices for bounce processing or content length. My best practice recommendations are really about process. Send only opt-in...
If you’re sending email from any address beginning with a 65 – in 65.0.0.0/8 – it’s possible you’ll see some delivery problems.
Something appears to be broken with dnssec signatures for the reverse DNS zone, leading queries for reverse DNS to fail for anyone using a dnssec aware DNS resolver (which is almost everyone).
Ray Tomlinson has passed away. Mainstream obituaries are going to focus on his being “the creator of email” or “the sender of the first email” or “the inventor of the @ sign in email addresses“. All of which are true. He did send the first (networked) email. He did use the (otherwise mostly unused on TENEX) @ sign to separate user and host. But he did a lot of...
Here at the Atkins house we’re still both recovering from the M3AAWG plague. I don’t know what it was that we shared during the conference, but it’s knocked many folks over. I don’t have a lot to blog about this afternoon so I was looking through some of my old blog posts to get at least some content up before I give up for the weekend. I found an old post about permission...
Happy March! Here’s a look back at our last month of email adventures. It was a busy few weeks for us with the M3AAWG meeting in San Francisco. We saw lots of old friends and met many new people — all in all, a success, despite the M3AAWG plague we both contracted. Hot topics at the conference included DMARC, of course, and I took the opportunity to write up a guide to help you determine if...
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