I know a lot of folks working at ESPs. For those I know well, I will usually send in reports. Sometimes they’re not spam reports per se. Often it’s just “hey, this sender shouldn’t have my address, might want to poke them.” Sometimes it’s even more specific. A few years ago I spoke at a user conference for an ESP. I stayed at the hotel for one night, and the...
Ask Laura: Why is my video email blocked?
Dear Laura, We have a real estate client who has asked us to include short video previews of houses in their weekly newsletters to prospective buyers. The videos are great — informative, well-produced, and they definitely meet your definition of wanted email, as subscribers have been asking for this content for a long time. Unfortunately, we are learning that many email service providers...
DOD breaks links in .mil clients
The Department of Defense is breaking HTML links in mail to .mil domains. This is part of the DoD’s attempt to curtail phishing. a great majority of intrusions into Pentagon networks are the result of the kind of human error that is exploited in phishing attacks, in which seemingly trustworthy e-mail links are used as attack vectors to hijack user computers, install malware or steal...
Email design resources
One of the more frequent questions I get that I can’t answer is how to design a good email. Design is just not my strong point and outside actually getting the HTML right, what an email looks like doesn’t have a whole lot to do with delivery. It was pointed out to me today that the nice people over at Mailchimp have a resource page for designing emails. It’s a good mix of...
Update on FixOutlook.org campaign
Last week I mentioned that the Email Standards Project has started a website (FixOutlook.org) and a twitter campaign to pressure Microsoft to use a HTML compliant rendering engine for Outlook. Currently Outlook uses the HTML engine in MS Word and that engine is not fully compliant with of the HTML standards as published by W3C.org. Microsoft did reply to the FixOutlook.org campaign on the MSDN...