Tagfiltering

November 20, 2013

Holiday mailing advice from mailbox providers

By laura

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20November

Christine Borgia has a post on the Return Path blog where she interviews a number of different groups (spamfilters, DNSBLs, mailbox providers) about their filtering strategy for the holidays. Overall, no one changes their filtering during the Holiday Mailing Season. On the other hand, many marketers do change their marketing strategies in ways that trigger more filtering and blocking. The take...

November 6, 2013

Looking for message labs help?

By laura

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06November

There’s a common bounce error from the Message Labs’ filtering appliance that goes no where.
501 Connection rejected by policy [7.7] please visit www.messagelabs.com/support
If you’re trying to troubleshoot a delivery problem and you find any reference to www.messagelabs.com/support, try  instead. That link provides a little more information.

September 11, 2013

ISP Relationships

By laura

4 Min read

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11September

Delivra has a new whitepaper written by Ken Magill talking about the value (or lack thereof) of relationships with ISPs. In Ken’s understated way, he calls baloney on ESPs that claim they have great delivery because they have good relationships with ISPs. He’s right. I get a lot of calls from potential clients and some calls from current clients asking me if I can contact an ISP on...

September 9, 2013

Questions on Google lawsuit post

By laura

2 Min read

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09September

A couple questions in the previous discussion thread about the Google privacy case. Both concern permission granted to Google to scan emails. Google’s stance about this is fairly simple. Gmail users give explicit permission for their mail to be scanned. People who send mail to Gmail users give implicit permission for their mail to be scanned. The plaintiff’s lawyers are alleging that...

August 5, 2013

Inbox challenges and dull email in the tabbed inbox

By laura

3 Min read

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05August

Getting to the inbox is becoming a greater and greater challenge for many marketers. According to Return Path, 22% of opt in mail doesn’t make it to the inbox. The challenge to marketers is that a lot of opt in mail isn’t important to the recipient. Sure, they’re happy enough to get it if they notice it, but if it’s not there then they don’t care. They’ll buy...

March 7, 2013

The 5 stages of a Spamhaus listing

By laura

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07March

Courtesy of Spencer over at Experian.
The 5 Stages of Recovery

March 6, 2013

Questions about Spamhaus

By laura

2 Min read

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06March

I have gotten a lot of questions about Spamhaus since I’ve been talking about them on the blog and on various mailing lists. Those questions can be condensed and summed up into a single thought. What engagement metrics should I monitor to avoid a Spamhaus listing? First off Spamhaus doesn’t care about about engagement. Spamhaus wants you to stop mailing people who never asked to...

March 4, 2013

Filtering is not just about spam

By laura

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04March

A lot of filters started out just as filters against spam. But over the years they’ve morphed into more general blocks against dangerous or problematic email. There’s a lot of crime and bad behavior on the internet, much of it using email as a conduit or vector. Filtering is so much more than stopping spam now. It’s as much, or more, about stopping crime. Email filters are...

February 28, 2013

Censoring email

By laura

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28February

It seems some mail to Apple’s iCloud has been caught in filters. Apparently, a few months ago someone sent a script to a iCloud user that contained the phrase “barely legal teen” and Apple’s filters ate it. The amount of hysteria that I’ve seen in some places about this, though, seems excessive. One of my favorite quotes was from MacWorld and just tells me that many...

December 13, 2012

There is no bat phone

By laura

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13December

I don’t have much to add to Al’s post about the lack of people to call at different ISPs to get mail delivered. I will say there was a time some ISPs had staff that would deal with senders and blocking problems. But those positions have gradually been eliminated over the last 2 or 3 years. In some cases the employees left for greener pastures, in others they were subject to layoffs...