Tagdata verification

February 17, 2020

Address verification doesn’t fix any real problem

By laura

8 Min read

2 comments

17February

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...

November 17, 2017

Catchall domains

By laura

2 Min read

1 comment

17November

Catchall domains accept any mail to any email address at that domain. They were quite common, particularly at smaller domains, a long time ago. For various reasons, most of them having to do with spammers, they’re less common now. Most folks think catchall domains are only used for spamtraps. As a consequence, many of the address verification tools will filter out, or recommend filtering...

April 29, 2016

Trust the list broker

By laura

2 Min read

1 comment

29April

Over the years I’ve worked with companies who admit to me that they’ve purchased data at one point or another. Let’s face it, as bad a practice as it is, people and companies still think they can succeed in email marketing with purchased lists. As part of the cleanup process, I start to ask questions about the list. Who did you buy it from? How were the addressees collected? Are...

September 9, 2015

Organizational security and doxxing

By laura

2 Min read

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09September

The security risks of organizational doxxing.  These are risks every email marketer needs to understand. As collectors of data they are a major target for hackers and other bad people. Even worse, many marketers don’t collect valid data and risk implicating the wrong people if their data is ever stolen. I have repeatedly talked about incidents where people get mail not intended for them...

September 8, 2015

It's not about the spamtraps

By laura

5 Min read

1 comment

08September

I’ve talked about spamtraps in the past but they keep coming up in so many different discussions I have with people about delivery that I feel the need to write another blog post about them. Spamtraps are … … addresses that did not or could not sign up to receive mail from a sender. … often mistakenly entered into signup forms (typos or people who don’t know their...

August 19, 2015

Linking identities to email addresses

By laura

4 Min read

1 comment

19August

As I predicted yesterday, a bunch of sites have popped up where you can input email addresses and find out if the address was part of the Ashley Madison hack. My spam trap address isn’t on it, which makes me wonder if unsubscribe data was kept elsewhere or if they just never bothered to save the requests. One of the things I’m seeing in most articles about the hack is reassurance that...

July 21, 2015

Yes, Virginia, there is list churn

By laura

4 Min read

3 comments

21July

Yesterday I talked about how data collection, management, and maintenance play a crucial role in deliverability.  I mentioned, briefly, the idea that bad data can accumulate on a list that isn’t well managed. Today I’d like to dig into that a little more and talk about the non-permanence of email addresses. A common statistic used to describe list churn is that 30% of addresses become...

July 20, 2015

Data is the key to deliverability

By laura

4 Min read

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20July

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking to the Sendgrid Customer Advisory Board about email and deliverability. As usually happens when I give talks, I learned a bunch of new things that I’m now integrating into my mental model of email. One thing that bubbled up to take over a lot of my thought processes is how important data collection and data maintenance is to deliverability. In fact...

April 30, 2015

Email verification services

By laura

3 Min read

3 comments

30April

Just yesterday a group of delivery folks were discussing email verification services over IRC. We were talking about the pros and cons, when we’d suggest using them, when we wouldn’t, which ones we’ve worked with and what our experiences have been. I’ve been contemplating writing up some of my thoughts about verification services but it’s a post I wanted to spend...

October 18, 2013

Misdirected email

By laura

1 Min read

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18October

While this does seem to be more common with gmail addresses, it’s not solely limited to gmail. I’ve written about this frequently. Don’t leave that money sitting there. Sending mail to the wrong person, part eleventy. Email verification, what are we verifying. Recycled Yahoo addresses and PII leaks. Dr. Livingston, I presume. No, I’m really not Christine. Confirming...