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October 1, 2014

September 2014: The Month in Email

By laura

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01October

September was another busy month for us, but Steve stepped up and wrote a number of really interesting posts on email history, cryptography, and current technical issues in the email landscape. We started the month with a look at the various RFCs that served as the technical specifications for developing message transfer protocols in the 1970s. It’s really fascinating to look at the evolution of...

September 23, 2014

Think you know about deliverability?

By laura

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23September

Check out the tweets from my AMA webinar sponsored by Message Systems today.
Thanks to the AMA and Message Systems for having me.

September 1, 2014

Email History through RFCs

By steve

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01September

Many aspects of email are a lot older than you may think. There were quite a few people in the early 1970s working out how to provide useful services using ARPANET, the network that evolved over the next 10 or 15 years into the modern Internet. They used Requests for Comment (RFCs) to document protocol and research, much as is still done today. Here are some of the interesting milestones. April...

August 20, 2014

Unsubscribing is hard

By laura

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20August

A comment came through on my post about unsubscribing that helpfully told me that the problem was I didn’t unsubscribe correctly. As you know, there are usually two unsubscribe options in many of the bulk senders emails. Are you unsubscribing from the global or the offer unsub? Unless you are unsubscribing from both, you will still be on the lists. To address the underlying question, I did...

August 5, 2014

Asynchronous Bounces

By steve

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05August

There are three ways that an email can fail to be delivered: immediate rejection timeout asynchronous bounce Rejection A rejection is any delivery attempt where the sending smarthost can tell immediately that the mail can’t be delivered. That will often be when the receiving machine accepts a connection but returns a “hard bounce” or “5xx” error at some point in...

August 4, 2014

July 2014: The month in email

By laura

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04August

We continue to be busy with really interesting client work. Look for some new posts and white papers to come out of this research over the next few months, but for now blogging has been a bit light while we’re working hard. In parallel with our busy times, we have also been pondering the ways in which the email world illustrates the classic bon mot  “plus ça change, plus c’est la même...

July 10, 2014

CASL is more privacy law than anti-spam law

By laura

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10July

Michael Geist, a law professor in Canada, writes about the new CASL law, why it’s necessary and why it’s more about privacy and consumer protection than just about spam. The law has at least three goals: provide Canada with tough anti-spam rules, require software companies to better inform consumers about their programs before installation, and update Canadian privacy standards by re...

July 2, 2014

June 2014: The month in email

By laura

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02July

Each month, we like to focus on a core email feature or function and present an overview for people looking to learn more. This month, we addressed authentication with SPF. We also talked about feedback mechanisms, and the importance for senders to participate in FBL processes. In our ongoing discussions about spam filters, we took a look at the state of our own inboxes and lamented the challenge...

June 25, 2014

Ever changing filtering

By laura

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25June

One of the ongoing challenges sending email, and managing a high volume outbound mail server is dealing with the ongoing changes in filtering. Filters are not static, nor can they be. As ISPs and filtering companies identify new ways to separate out wanted email from unwanted email, spammers find new ways to make their mail look more like wanted mail. This is one reason traps are useful to...

June 20, 2014

Role accounts, ESPs and commercial email

By laura

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20June

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...