As happens every Tuesday, the Magill Report was blasted into mailboxes all over the Internet. This Tuesday was extra special for some recipients, though. These recipients received a dozen or more copies of the newsletter. Ken knows best practices and implements them rigidly in regards to his sending. He’s one of the very few standalone publishers that uses confirmed opt-in, for instance...
A couple weeks ago I had a discussion with Ken Magill of the Magill Report about spam traps. He had moderated a webinar about spam traps and I publicly contradicted some of the statements made about spam traps. He contacted me and interviewed me for an updated article about traps for his newsletter. The next week he had a rebuttal from Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx, taking anti-spammers (and...
Lost in all of the DOS attack news this week is that the first installment of Spamhaus answering questions from marketers in Ken Magill’s newsletter. It’s well worth a read for anyone who is interested in hearing directly from Spamhaus. One quote stood out for me, and it really sums up how I try to work with clients and their email programs. Playing evasion games to avoid traps is...
Ken has an article today about how Pro Flowers managed to get their mail out of the bulk folder at Gmail by asking their recipients for help. This year, ProFlowers apparently took into account Gmail’s use of sender reputation and user engagement in its spam filtering rules by using subject lines, such as: “Gmail Customer Notice: Open if you missed yesterday’s special discount!” and “Help Teach...
I made that joke the other night and most of the folks who heard it didn’t get the reference. It made me feel just a little bit old. Anyhow, Mickey beat me to it and posted much of what I was going to say about Ken Magill’s response to a very small quote from Neil’s guest post on expiring email headers last week. I, too, was at that meeting, and at many other meetings where...
Last week the Only Influencers email discussion group tackled this question posed by Ken Magill. How do you gently educate one’s customers or employer to use permission-based marketing? Ken published the responses in his Tuesday newsletter. For a number of reasons I didn’t participate in the conversation, but I’ve been thinking about the question a lot. How do I evangelize...
I have been reading the complaints filed by Holomaxx and will have some analysis and information about them probably Monday or Tuesday next week. I’ve been keeping an eye on the press and something that Ken Magill said caught my eye. Specifically, HolomaXx alleges, its Microsoft complaint rates have been consistently at or below 0.5 percent and its Yahoo complaint rates have been at or...
The first edition of the Magill Report dropped in my mailbox (and the mailboxes of lots of other people judged by my twitter feed) this afternoon. In his newsletter, tucked between an announcement of a new DMA CEO and rather depressing news about how long it’s taking to find jobs, he announced that Goodmail is being offered for sale. It seems that an investment banking firm is offering a...
After a 6 month hiatus, Ken Magill has returned to offer his insightful, and somewhat snarky, take on email marketing. You can subscribe at The Magill Report. Ken is really trying to make this report an example of how to do ad supported email newsletters right. When I subscribed yesterday I received the following welcome message: Please click here to confirm your subscription to The Magill Report...
Recently Ken Magill wrote an article looking at how an ESP was attempting to sell him services based on the ESPs ‘high deliverability rates.’ I commented that Ken was right, and I still think he is. Ken has a followup article today. In the first part he thanks Matt Blumberg from Return Path for posting a thoughtful blog post on the piece. Matt did have a very thoughtful article...
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