In my consulting, I emphasize that senders must set recipient expectations correctly. Receiver sites spend a lot of time listening to their users and design filters to let wanted and expected mail through. Senders that treat recipients as partners in their success usually have much better email delivery than those senders that treat recipients as targets or marks. Over the years I’ve heard...
How many email marketers hand over email addresses whenever asked? Are those of us in the email field more or less likely than the average consumer to sign up for something? I sign up for a lot of mail, but there are different categories of that mail. Mail I actually want from a company. Usually these are local companies where I visit their brick and mortar or an online only company that I...
Ben at Mailchimp has a post up explaining what role accounts are and why mailing to them can be a problem. role addresses are built for functions, not people… If you read down in the comments you will see that they talk about how some people do use role accounts for their subscriptions. Small businesses might have a limited number of email accounts with their hosting, so they use info@ or sales@...
There have been a number of reports recently about customer lists leaking out through ESPs. In one case, the ESP attributed the leak to an outside hack. In other cases, the ESPs and companies involved have kept the information very quiet and not told anyone that data was leaked. People do notice, though, when they use single use addresses or tagged addresses and know to whom each address was...
One thing anyone collecting email addresses anywhere has to think about is address validation. How do you prevent users from typing bad addresses into your forms? I ran into this yesterday attempting to take an online quiz. Before I was allowed to take the quiz, I had to provide my name, phone number and email address. Initially I attempted to use a tagged email address. This is one that delivers...
Paul explains 3 ways spammers get your email address.
Venkat has an analysis of a case where an individual provided a unique address to a vendor and that vendor released the address in violation of the posted privacy policy. The federal court rejected the suit due to the failure of the plaintiff to provide evidence of harm. I posted last week about privacy policies and how often they are intentionally or unintentionally violated and when email...
As promised last week, here are some actual recommendations for handling email addresses. First some things to check when capturing an email address from a user, or when importing a list. These will exclude some legitimate email addresses, but not any that anyone is likely to actually be using. And they’ll allow in some email addresses that are technically not legal, by erring on the side...
Yesterday I talked about the technical definitions of an email address. Eventually on Monday I’m going to talk about some useful day-to-day rules about email address acquisition and analysis, but first I’m going to take a detour into tagging or mailboxing email addresses. Tagging an email address is something the owner of an email address can do to make it easier to handle incoming...
Given we deal with email addresses every day, dozens or thousands or millions of them, it seems a bit strange to ask what an email address is – but given some of the problems people have with the grubbier corners of address syntax it’s actually an interesting question. There are two real standards that define what is a valid email address and what isn’t. The most complex is RFC...
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