Over the weekend I noticed a new CSS framework aimed at email rather than web development, “Antwort“. This isn’t the first or only framework for email content, but this one looks simple and robust, and it allows for content that doesn’t just adapt for different sized displays but looks good on all of them. The idea behind it is to divide your content into columns, magazine...
Thanks, everyone, who submitted questions to laura-questions@wordtothewise.com. We’ve gotten some great questions to answer here on the blog. I’m working through the emails and contacting folks if I have questions. I’ll be answering the first question on Wednesday. I also did have someone harvest the address off the website and send me non-CAN SPAM compliant spam to it. I have...
Return Path have an interesting post up about content filtering. I like the model of 3 different kinds of filters, in fact it’s one I’ve been using with clients for over 18 months. Spamfiltering isn’t really about one number or one filter result, it’s a complex interaction of lots of different heuristics designed to answer the question: do recipients want this kind of mail?
Much like every other day, I got some spam today. Here’s a lightly edited copy of it. Let’s go through it and see what they did that makes it clear that it’s spam, which companies helped them out, and what you should avoid doing to avoid looking like these spammers… Received: from [213.144.59.132] (114.sub-75-210-142.myvzw.com [75.210.142.114] by m.wordtothewise.com...
Return Path published their most recent Global Deliverability report this morning. (Get the Report) This shows that inbox placement of mail has decreased 6% in the second half of 2011. This decrease is the largest decrease Return Path has seen in their years of doing this report. To be honest, I’m not surprised at the decrease. Filters are getting more sophisticated. This means...
There’s been quite a bit of traffic on twitter this afternoon about a recent blog post by Hubspot identifying trigger words senders should avoid in an email subject line. A number of email experts are assuring the world that content doesn’t matter and are arguing on twitter and in the post comments that no one will block an email because those words are in the subject line. As...
I had the opportunity to go to a seminar and networking event hosted by Return Path yesterday evening. The topic was “Email trends in 2012” and it was presented by Tom Sather. If any of you get the opportunity to go to a talk presented by any of the Return Path folks I encourage you to do so. They know their stuff and their presentations are full of good information. One of the trends...
I’ve mentioned here before that I can usually tell when the big ISPs are making changes to their spam filtering as that ISP dominates my discussions with current and potential clients and many discussions on delivery mailing lists. The last two weeks the culprit has been Yahoo. They seem to be making a lot of changes to their filtering schemes right at the busiest email marketing time of...
Content based filters are incredibly complex and entire books could be written about how they work and what they look at. Of course, by the time the book was written it would be entirely obsolete. Because of their complexity, though, I am always looking for new ways to explain them to folks. Content based filters look at a whole range of things, from the actual text in the message, to the...
Over at SpamResource Al talks about how sharing content is like sharing needles. If you’re going to share email templates with somebody else, you’re sharing in their reputation. Lots of good spam filters, like those at Cloudmark, Brightmail, Yahoo and elsewhere, they use what is commonly called “content fingerprinting.” Content fingerprinting is something that a lot of people...
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