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.
“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...
My speaking schedule is coming together for Q1 and Q2 this year. Email Evolution Conference. March 30 – April 1. New Orleans, LA. I’ll be participating on the “All You Ever Wanted to Know about Deliverability (But Were Afraid to Ask)” panel Friday Morning. The other panelists are Chris Arrendale, Alyssa Nahatis and Matthew Vernhout. This panel should be quite a bit of fun...
Last week Mandrill announced that they were discontinuing their free services and all customers would be required to have a corresponding paid Mailchimp account. Going forward, all Mandrill users will be required to have a paid monthly MailChimp account and verify ownership of all sending domains. Important changes to Mandrill On March 16th all new Mandrill users will be required to create a...
Dear Laura, We’re a small online retailer and email is a very important sales and communication channel for us. We do marketing and newsletters with Mailchimp, transaction confirmations with Bigcommerce, and a few other messages via Salesforce. Our volumes are relatively low, but we’re in an industry that can be a bit of a red flag for spam. We have a few different lists in Mailchimp. The...
RSS - Posts