One thing I really like about going to conferences is they’re often one of the few times I get to sit and think about the bigger email picture. Hearing other people talk about their marketing experiences, their email experiences, and their blocking experiences usually triggers big picture style thoughts. Earlier this week I was at Activate18, hosted by Iterable. The sessions I attended were...
An interesting observation from Brian Curry about how Microsoft is using the List Unsubscribe header in their interface. The short version is that Microsoft is only supporting mailto: links. They’re ignoring any List-Unsubscribe links that are a URL. Here are some screenshots. When the sender is using a List-Unsubscribe <; header, Microsoft states that there is no information on how to...
You can’t technical your way out of the bulk folder. I wrote that a year and a half ago, and it’s even more true today. Filters at the big webmail providers continue to evolve to meet new threats and new spamming techniques. Sending technically perfect mail won’t get your mail into the inbox. Recipients have to want the mail and interact with the mail for good delivery.
Two of the very first posts I wrote on the blog were about permission (part 1, part 2). Re-reading those posts is interesting. Experience has taught me that recipients are much more forgiving of implicit opt-in than that post implies. The chance in recipient expectations doesn’t mean, however, that permission isn’t important or required. In fact, The Verge reported on a chatbot that...
In the email space we talk about filters as if they were sentient beings. “The filters decided…” “The filters said…” This is convenient shorthand, but tends to mask that filters aren’t actually deciding or saying anything. Filters are software processes that follow rules dictated by the people who create and maintain them. The rules flow from the goals...
In the delivery space, stuff comes in cycles. We’re currently in a cycle where people are unhappy with spam filters. There are two reasons they’re unhappy: false positives and false negatives. False positives are emails that the user doesn’t think is spam but goes into the bulk folder anyway. Fales negatives are emails that the user does thing is spam but is delivered to the...
The two most hated words in deliverability. Many people ask general questions about deliverability and most experts, including myself, answer, “It depends.” There are a lot of problems with this answer. The biggest problem is that it’s led to the impression that there are no real answers about deliverability. That because we can’t answer hypothetical questions we are...
As a small business owner I am a ripe target for many companies. They buy my address from some lead generation firm, or they scrape it off LinkedIn, and they send me a message that pretends to be personalized but isn’t really. “I looked at your website… we have a list of email addresses to sell you.” “We offer cold calling services… can I set up a call with you...
Folks were posting earlier today noticing problems delivering to Barracuda hosted services. The good news is Barracuda has been updating their status page. As of now, the status page says things are improving. Monitoring – Since 7PM PDT 11/1/2016, the Barracuda Essentials for Email Security service has been experiencing a sustained and unusually large number of inbound connections from...
Hi Laura, First of all, I’d like to thank you for the amazing blog. It helps me a lot and I have much fun to read it. Now I have a question to the google alias addresses. As you must have known, Google offers alias addresses and you can put any thing between the local part and @gmail.com with a “+” sign What do you think, what should the onlineshops deal with such address for...
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