There comes a time in many marketers’ lives where they are faced with and old, stale database and a management chain that wants to mail those addresses. Smart marketers know that delivery problems will arise if they just reactivate all those users. They also know that mailing older addresses can affect current and engaged addresses as well. Still, many executives think there is no downside...
Would you trust an address verification company that used twitter spam to advertise their product? Would you trust an address verification company that sent email spam to advertise their product? Would you trust an address verification company that sent email advertising their product to made up addresses? Would you trust an address verification company that sent email advertising their product...
A couple folks have asked me recently about MX records that they don’t understand. These records consist of a single . or they contain localhost or they are 127.0.0.1. In all cases, the domain owners use these records to signal that the domains don’t accept email. What do these records look like? Why do domains do this? In all cases it’s because the domain owners want to signal...
There was confirmation this week that the increase in “user unknown” messages from Yahoo is actually Yahoo cleaning out abandoned accounts. At the same time a Yahoo is sending out notifications to folks to log into mail. The first thing every sender should do is remove all these Yahoo addresses from their lists. They’re done, kaput. Gone. There are some other things worth doing...
I’ve been waiting for this to happen. An email verification vendor has left their database of 800 million email addresses along with detailed individual data. unprotected on the internet. Bob Diachenko reported the discovery yesterday on his blog. Wired also ran an article (An Email Marketing Company Left 809 Million Records Exposed Online) based on his findings. Padlock on a keyboard with...
I really dislike whomever it was that coined the term pristine spamtraps. I get what they were trying to do, explain the different kinds of spamtraps and how different traps get on your list in different ways. Except… any type of trap can end up on your list in any way. For instance, not every recycled trap shows up on a list because bounce handling is bad. Sometimes, people input their old...
Spamtraps strike fear into the heart of senders. They’ve turned into this monster metric that can make or break a marketing program. They’ve become a measure and a goal and I think some senders put way too much emphasis on spamtraps instead of worrying about their overall data accuracy. Recently I got a question from a client about the chances that any address they were currently...
Over the past few years a number of email delivery products have been launched. Many of these products are intended to improve deliverability by improving metrics. The problem is they don’t work the way their purchasers thing. Take data hygiene services. For the most part, these services take a list of email addresses, do data analysis and magic and then return a “clean” list to...
As a digital channel, email provides a lot of different metrics for marketers to use. Not only can marketers measure things like open and click rates, but they can tie these numbers back to a particular recipient. This treasure trove of information leads to obsessing over making the numbers look good. For good deliverability senders want low bounce rates, low spamtrap rates, and high engagement...
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