It used to be when I’d send in a complaint to an ESP, I’d want them to take it seriously. To actually fix their customer problems. To stop their customers from spamming. To fix the broken process that resulted in their customer thinking I asked for email. These days? These days I just want the ESP to suppress my address and make the mail stop. Even better would be suppressing the...
Reports today say that Salesforce is buying Exacttarget for around 2.5 billion dollars.
The offer for $33.75 per share in cash is 53 percent more that ExactTarget’s closing price yesterday. The transaction has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies, according to a statement today.
Clients and random people often ask me to recommend an ESP based on “the best delivery.” I usually point out that most of the reputable ESPs are similar in terms of their delivery. There aren’t many widely used reputation services that block based on ESPs unless there is long term and ongoing problem from the ESP. This is even more true when the ESP uses dedicated IPs for...
Today’s question comes from Leslie J. Just how difficult is it for a small business that runs a highly compliant mailing system to find their way onto whitelists at the big freemail/spam filter providers? It seems utterly impossible meaning man hours are completely wasted messing around with subjects and content when if the same business sends the very same message through any number of...
Campaign Monitor contacted me about yesterday’s post. The phrasing I picked out of the spammers AUP matched their AUP quite closely. In fact, if you plug the AUP into Google, Campaign Monitor comes up as one of the first hits. It was not Campaign Monitor I was talking about. In fact, the ESP I received the mail from is not on the first 8 pages of Google hits for the phrases I posted. A...
In my mailbox there is a definite uptick in spam from ESPs advertising their services. Today’s email was from a company that has the following in their anti-spam policy: To send email to anyone using [ESP name], you must have clearly obtained their permission. We consider qualifying methods for obtaining permission are as follows: An email newsletter subscription form on your web site. An...
One of the things that is most frustrating to me about sending in spam reports is that many ESPs and senders don’t actively monitor their abuse address. A few months ago I talked about getting spam from Dell to multiple email addresses of mine. What I didn’t talk about was how badly broken the ESP was in handling my complaint. The ESP was, like many ESPs, an organization that grew...
It’s been about a year since people started publicly talking about spear phishing attacks against ESPs and major emailers. There was a lot of energy put into talking about how to protect against future attacks. I have to wonder, though, how much of that talk translated into action? What processes do you have in place to protect your company against attacks? If you’re at an ESP, do you...
Steve wrote a while back about how Mailchimp handled his complaint. Sadly, I have a counter example from recently. Hey, guys, You’ve got a customer hitting an address they bought from someone selling really old lists. This entire domain was retired more than 5 years ago, and laura-info@ was never used to sign up for anything. I sent it to abuse@ the ESP because I thought it might do some...
I wrote earlier this week about bad ways to evaluate and choose an ESP. It was all going to end today in an insightful and profound post telling all of you exactly how to find the best ESP. Then Smartinsights published an insightful and useful article on choosing an ESP yesterday. So, yeah, just go read what Jordie has to say. I have a couple other things to add, but I’ll drop those in...
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