Six years ago today I wrote here “Spam isn’t going away“, talking about systemic problems at Google, Cloudflare and Amazon and in India. If I were writing it today I might mention Microsoft, Salesforce and ExactTarget as well as Google, and might stress Amazon less (mostly because all the Amazon spam sites tend to be hidden behind Cloudflare, so you don’t know...
There are times when I hesitate to call what marketers do “spam.” I can use the euphemisms with the best of ’em. “Cold emails” “Targeted Marketing” “B2B marketing.” I’ll say it here and now: cold emails are spam. Sales people who are sending enough email that they require automation to actually send the mail are spamming. Look at this...
One of the toughest deliverability problems to deal with is when mail is blocked or going to spam because the filters are working as intended. Often the underlying issue is a lack of permission. In the consumer space there are some thing the sender can do to change their metrics and get to the inbox. The reality is that a lot of companies who send to consumers can get good delivery even when they...
This morning I got an email to a tagged address. The tag matched the company so it’s very likely I did actually sign up. Digging back through my mailbox, I see one previous email to that account – back in 2008. 2008. One email. Who knows why I signed up and gave them an email address. Maybe I made a comment on their website. Or perhaps I signed up while investigating something for a...
Mimecast is a filter primarily used by businesses. They’re fairly widely used. In some of the data analysis I’ve done for clients, they’re a top 10 or top 20 filter. Earlier today someone asked on Facebook if mimecast may be blocking emails based on the TLD. The short answer is it’s unlikely. I’ve not seen huge issues with them blocking based on TLD of the domain...
Dear Laura, I sometimes get in arguments with clients where I say, “your open rate is 3%, you need to do some list pruning” and they say, “my recipient list is 100% b2b, and b2b filters don’t care about engagement, so it doesn’t matter if my list is really old and unengaged.” This is wrong in cases where the business is using Outlook or Gsuite, both of which are going to care if they see...
All to often we think of filters as a linear scale. There’s blocking on one end, and there’s an inbox on the other. Every email falls somewhere on that line. Makes sense, right? Bad mail is blocked, good mail goes to the inbox. The bulk folder exists for mail that’s not bad enough to block, but isn’t good enough to go to the inbox. Once we get to that model, we can think...
I got a piece of B2B spam last week that showed in several different ways why spam isn’t going away any time soon. Systemic problems dealing with abuse at scale at Google. Ethics problems at Cloudflare. Problems dealing with abuse at scale at Amazon. Cultural problems in India, several times over. Buckle up. The spam content The spam email itself looks pretty much like any business email...
It seems silly to have to say this, but connecting on social media is not permission to add an address to your newsletter or mailing list or prospecting list or spam list. Back in 2016, I wrote: [Scraping addresses from LinkedIn] is really rude. Just because someone accepted your contact request on LinkedIn, doesn’t mean they want to be added to any mailing lists you may have. Let’s be honest...
We’re in the thick of the busiest time of the year for email. It’s been so busy, in fact, that we’ve seen some slowdowns and delivery issues across the email universe. It may be worth thinking about alternate strategies for end of year promotions beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I was delighted to chat with Julia Angwin for her ProPublica piece on subscription bombing and abuse prevention...
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