I was answering a question on Mailop earlier today and had one of those moments of clarity. I finally managed to articulate one of the things I’ve known about Gmail, but never been able to explain. See, Gmail has never really put a lot of their filtering on the SMTP transaction and IP reputation. Other ISPs do a lot of the heavy lifting with IP filters. But not Gmail. While I was writing...
One thing that catches me up with clients sometimes is their own spam filters block their own content. It happens. In some cases the client is using an appliance. The client’s reputation is bad enough that the appliance actually blocks mail. Often these clients have no idea they are blocking their own mail, until we try and send them something and the mail is rejected. Typically, the issue...
EEC16 was my first Email Experience conference. I was very impressed. Dennis, Len, and Ryan put together a great program. I made it to two of the keynotes and both took me out of an email focused place to look at the bigger picture. Patrick Scissons discussed his experiences creating marketing and advertising campaigns for good and to share messages. Some of the campaigns were ones I’d seen...
Happy April! I’m just back from the EEC conference in New Orleans, which was terrific. I wrote a quick post about a great session on content marketing, and I’ll have more to add about the rest of the conference over the next week or so. Stay tuned! Here’s a look at what caught our attention in March: On the DMARC front, we noted that both Yahoo and mail.ru are moving forward with p=reject, and...
I’m having a great time here at #EEC16. Today is my visit and go to sessions day, since tomorrow I’m speaking at 2 different sessions. I was lucky enough to get into the Customer Experience session presented by Carey Kegel of SmartPak and Loren McDonald of IBM Marketing Cloud. It was an interesting session. If you don’t know, SmartPak is a brand focused on selling horse tack and...
It’s February already! January went fast, right? At WttW, we are gearing up for MAAWG SF later this month — will we see you there? We started the year with a set of predictions about email. Mostly we think email will continue to be great at some things and not-so-great at other things, and we’ll keep fighting the good fight to make it better. As always, I’m interested in filters and how...
Content filtering is often hard to explain to people, and I’m not sure I’ve yet come up with a good way to explain it. A lot of people think content reputation is about specific words in the message. The traditional content explanation is that words like “Free” or too many exclamation points in the subject line are bad and will be filtered. But it’s not the words...
I was first introduced to the maxim “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras” when I worked in my first molecular biology lab 20-some-odd years ago. I’m no longer a gene jockey, but I still find myself applying this to troubleshooting delivery problems for clients. It’s not that I think all delivery problems are caused by “horses”, or that...
Back in the dark ages of email delivery the only thing that really mattered to get your email into the inbox was having a good IP reputation. If your IP sent good mail most of the time, then that mail got into the inbox and all was well with the world. All that mattered was that good IP reputation. Even better for the people who wanted to game the system and get their spam into the inbox, there...
One of the biggest arguments against confirmation is that it’s too hard and that there is too much drop off from subscribers. In other words, recipients don’t want to confirm because it’s too much work on their part. I don’t actually think it’s too much work for recipients. In fact, when a sender has something the recipient wants then they will confirm. A couple...
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