Greetings from Dublin, where we’re gearing up for M3AAWG adventures. In the blog this month, we did a post on purchased lists that got a lot of attention. If you’ve been reading the blog for any length of time, you know how I feel about purchased lists — they perform poorly and cause delivery problems, and we always advise clients to steer clear. With your help, we’ve now compiled a list of...
Last week, another email provider announced their systems had a security incident. Mandrill’s internal security team detected unusual activity and took the servers offline to investigate. While there’s no sign any data was compromised or servers infiltrated, Mandrill sent an email to their customers explaining the incident was due to a firewall rule change. Email service providers are a...
Earlier this week Bloomberg news reported that an anonymous source told them Verizon was looking to acquire or investigate a partnership with AOL. It didn’t take long for the Verizon CEO to quash the acquisition rumors. Acquisitions and partnerships have always been around in technology, this is nothing new. But it made me think a little bit about the acquisitions and mergers in the ESP...
Here are the top 6 most commented on blog topics our Industry News & Analysis blog. In April, Laura wrote about the ins and outs about Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance also known as DMARC. If you are not familiar with DMARC or want to know the differences between strict and relaxed alignment, read the blog post here. Earlier this year WttW’s website was...
A couple weeks ago, I published a blog post about monetizing the complaint stream. The premise was that ESPs could offer lower base rates for sending if the customer agreed to pay per complaint. The idea came to me while talking with a deliverability expert at a major ESP. One of their potential customer wanted the ESP to allow them to mail purchased lists. The customer even offered to indemnify...
There was a discussion today on a marketing list about role accounts and marketing lists. Some ESPs block mail to role accounts, and the discussion was about why and if this is a good practice. In order to answer that question, we really need to understand role accounts a little more. What are role accounts? A definition I tend to use is role accounts are email addresses that map to a business...
Last week Gmail started contacting ESPs that signed up for their new FBL with more information on how to set up mailings to receive FBL emails. One of the struggles some ESPs are having is the requirement for DKIM signing. Many of the bigger ESPs have clients that sign with their own domains. Gmail is telling these ESPs to insert a second DKIM signature to join the FBL. There are a couple reasons...
Promoted from yesterday’s comments, Spamhaus comments on my discussion of filtering companies getting tired of ESPs. You hit the nail square on, Laura. As Laura knows but many here might not, I am with the Spamhaus project. At one time I was leading efforts to clean up ESP spam. I am not deeply involved with ESP listings any longer. I can however testify that ESPs ask Spamhaus volunteers...
Last week I blogged about the changes at ISPs that make “ISP Relations” harder for many senders. But it’s not just ISPs that are making it a little more difficult to get answers to questions, some spam filtering companies are pulling back on offering support to senders. For instance, Cloudmark sent out an email to some ESPs late last week informing them that Cloudmark was...
The acquisition of email service providers continues. Last week Deluxe (yes, the check printing people) acquired Vertical Response. This appears to be positioning themselves to improve their collection of business services to include email marketing.
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