Last week, in Zombie email: part 1 and part 2 I talked a little about the history of email addresses and how changes in the ISP industry in the early to mid 2000’s brought about the rise of zombie email addresses. Today we’ll look at the effect zombie addresses have on email stats and why ISPs are starting to monitor zombie addresses. A zombie address, despite the fervent belief of...
Zombie email addresses: those email addresses that never really die, eat your brains and destroy your email delivery. To understand zombie addresses and why they’re just now becoming a problem, we really need to understand some of the history of email addresses. In the early days of the net, people got an email address usually associated directly with their access to the Internet. Many of...
I’ve watched a couple discussions around the email and anti-spam community recently with a bit of awe. It seems many email marketers are admitting they are powerless to actually implement all the good advice they give to others. They are admitting they can’t persuade, cajole, influence or pressure their companies to actually follow best practices. Some of the comments public and...
After a 6 month hiatus, Ken Magill has returned to offer his insightful, and somewhat snarky, take on email marketing. You can subscribe at The Magill Report. Ken is really trying to make this report an example of how to do ad supported email newsletters right. When I subscribed yesterday I received the following welcome message: Please click here to confirm your subscription to The Magill Report...
I mentioned yesterday one of the major political blogs launched their mailing list yesterday. I pointed out a number of things they did that may cause problems. Today, I discovered another problem. This particular blog has been around for a long time, probably close to 10 years. It allows anyone to join and create their own blogs and comment with registered users. As part of their new mailing...
I occasionally consult for activists using email. Their needs and requirements are a little different from email marketers. Sure, the requirements for email delivery are the same: relevant and engaging mail to people who requested it. But there are complicating issues that most marketers don’t necessarily have to deal with. Activist groups are attractive targets for forged signups. Think...
Hotmail has released a new version of their software with some changes. Return Path discusses the changes in depth, but there are a couple that senders may find helpful. If a user deletes a mail without reading it multiple times, Hotmail asks the user if they want to unsubscribe from the mail. Users can use a the new “sweep” feature to delete or file multiple emails easily Finally...
Want an improved email interface? Then build it. There’s been an ongoing discussion about adding thumbs up / thumbs down style buttons to email clients. While I am dubious this is a useful feature or something that recipients will use, if there are others in the industry that think it would be useful then I strongly suggest they go ahead and create it. In fact, there are a couple things...
Or so the WSJ technology blog would have us believe. Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over. In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we...
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