The riskiest email to send is that very first email. It’s a blank slate. Even if you’re sending confirmation messages, you don’t really know anything about how this email is going to affect your reputation. It’s Schroedinger’s email. The address is both good and bad, until you send to it. If it’s good, great things will happen. You’ll be happy. The...
October was a busy month. In addition to on boarding multiple new clients, we got new desks, I went to Toronto to see M3AAWG colleagues for a few days, and had oral surgery. Happily, we’re finally getting closer to having the full office setup. What is an office without a Grover Cat? (he was so pleased he figured out how to get onto it at standing height). All of this means that blogging...
As of October 31, 2017 signup forms and popup boxes provided by Mailchimp will no longer default to a double / confirmed opt-in process. Starting October 31, single opt-in will become the default setting for all MailChimp hosted, embedded, and pop-up signup forms. This announcement was made earlier today in their newsletter and has been spreading like wildfire around the email community. Of...
This morning I waded into a twitter discussion with a bunch of folks about some issues they were having with delivery to gmail. The discussion started with a blog post at detailed.com describing how some senders are seeing significant drops in open rates. I thought I’d take a look and see if I can help, because, hey, this is an interesting problem. I signed up for a bunch of the mail that...
“If you want to use another means that violates the law, and every common definition of “spam”, then by all means, go ahead. You can enjoy fines and being added to the ROKSO database,” says a comment on my recent COI blog post. It’s both disconcerting and entirely predictable. My post was a discussion of what to do with addresses that don’t confirm. Data tells us that...
Looking back through my archives it’s been about 4 years or so since I wrote about confirmed opt in. The last post was how COI wasn’t important, but making sure you were reaching the right person was important. Of course, I’ve also written about confirmed opt-in in general and how it was a tool somewhat akin to a sledgehammer. I’m inspired to write about it today because...
Today I received an email from Tumblr asking to confirm I still wanted the username I have there. I’ve not really been using Tumblr, I contributed a few things to the now-defunct Box of Meat, but I don’t really post there much. I think this kind of engagement is great. Confirming user names will do a whole lot to allow Tumblr to release some claimed but unused names back into the pool...
At M3AAWG 30 in San Francisco, Gmail representatives presented a session about best practices and what they wanted to see from senders. I came out of the session with a few takeaways. Gmail spends a lot of time and energy on filtering mail and giving the user the absolute best inbox experience possible. Gmail does per-user filtering, probably more than any other ISP out there. Gmail filters are...
After a few months of hiatus, I’m resurrecting the this month in email feature. So what did we talk about in February? Industry News There was quite a bit of industry news. M3AAWG was in mid-February and there were actually a few sessions we were allowed to blog about. Gmail announced their new pilot FBL program. Ladar Levinson gave the keynote talking about the Lavabit shutdown and his new...
For 25 hours the group De La Soul is releasing their entire catalog for free online. What none of the articles are mentioning is that they’re using this to build their database of email addresses in a way that’s going to result in a clean database of high value email addresses. How are they doing that? By making sure the addresses belong to their fans before they actually give fans...
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