Earlier this week one of my ESP clients contacted me. They have a new (potential?) customer dealing with some delivery challenges. Client was looking for advice on how to move the customer over and improve their delivery at the same time. My advice was actually pretty simple: this isn’t a customer you want. Walk away. I reached that conclusion about 10 seconds after I loaded the...
There’s been an explosion of “Google plugins” that facilitate spam through Gmail and G Suite. They have a similar set of features. Most of these features act to protect the spammer from spam filtering and the poor reputation that comes from purchasing lists and incessantly spamming targets. Some of these plugins have all the features of a full fledged ESP, except a SMTP server...
250OK has compiled advice about what buyers should ask when looking at new ESPs. The advice from various folks is spot on. Changing ESPs is a big undertaking, bigger than most people expect. It’s not like changing vendors for other services. It is a process and most of the time moving creates a short term dip in deliverability. I have a lot of theories and speculation as to why, but the...
Not long ago I was talking with a colleague who works for an ESP. She was telling me about this new client who is in the process of negotiating a contract. Normally she doesn’t get involved in negotiations, but the sales group brought her. It seems this new client is attempting to remove all mention of the anti-spam policy from the contract. As she is the deliverability and compliance...
A question came up on a recent deliverability panel about role accounts. What is a role account? A role account is an email address that goes to a particular role or position rather than to a person. In many cases email to that address gets sent to a ticketing system or sent to multiple people. Sometimes the address does go to a single person. The point of role accounts is to have standardized...
Happy April! I’m just back from the EEC conference in New Orleans, which was terrific. I wrote a quick post about a great session on content marketing, and I’ll have more to add about the rest of the conference over the next week or so. Stay tuned! Here’s a look at what caught our attention in March: On the DMARC front, we noted that both Yahoo and mail.ru are moving forward with p=reject, and...
Happy March! Here’s a look back at our last month of email adventures. It was a busy few weeks for us with the M3AAWG meeting in San Francisco. We saw lots of old friends and met many new people — all in all, a success, despite the M3AAWG plague we both contracted. Hot topics at the conference included DMARC, of course, and I took the opportunity to write up a guide to help you determine if...
Last week Mandrill announced that they were discontinuing their free services and all customers would be required to have a corresponding paid Mailchimp account. Going forward, all Mandrill users will be required to have a paid monthly MailChimp account and verify ownership of all sending domains. Important changes to Mandrill On March 16th all new Mandrill users will be required to create a...
It was about 8 months ago I published a list of ESPs that prohibit the use of purchased lists. There have been a number of interesting responses to that post. ESPs wanted to be added to the list The first iteration of the list was crowdsourced from different ESP representatives. They shared the info they had with each other. With their permission, I put it together into a post and published it...
I’ve been talking to a lot of companies recently who are dealing with some major delivery challenges probably related to their practice of purchasing lists and then sending advertising to every address on the list. They assure me that their businesses would be non-viable if they didn’t purchase lists and it has to be that way. Maybe that’s true, maybe it is more cost effective...
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