In an effort to get a blog post out yesterday before yet another doctor’s appointment I did not do nearly enough research on the company I mentioned selling list cleansing data. As Al correctly pointed out in the comments they are currently listed on the SBL. And when I actually did the research I should have done it was clear this company has a long term history of sending unsolicited...
One thing I get in some of the comments here and in some of the discussions I have with email senders is that no commercial emailer ever sends unsolicited email. That, clearly, at some point the recipient opted in to receive mail and if that person doesn’t want mail they shouldn’t ever give out their email address. I have an old yahoo address that’s used primarily as my Flickr...
Yesterday’s post was inspired by a number of questions I’ve fielded recently from people in the email industry. Some were clients, some were colleagues on mailing lists, but in most cases they’d found a delivery issue that they couldn’t solve and were looking for the elusive Human Representative of an ISP. There was a time when having a contact inside an ISP was almost...
Ever trawl through your logs and notice that there is a delivery problem somewhere? I’m sure everyone sending email in any volume has. What’s the first thing you do when you discover a block? A: Decide that something broke on your end and set about trying to figure out what you did to trigger the block. B: Decide that something broke on the ISP end and set about trying to find a human...
Jeanne Jennings published an interesting bit of research on open rates and inbox rates at ClickZ recently. Essentially she looked at two different industry studies and compared their results. The first study was the Return Path Global Delivery Survey and the second was the Epsilon North American Trend Results. What Jeanne found is that while Return Path shows a decrease in inbox placement...
YMMV. One of those abbreviations us old folks used ages ago before email had pictures and the closest we had to social networking was USENET and social gaming was in the form of MUDs. I rarely see it used any more. In a lot of ways that’s a sad thing. It was a very useful abbreviation. Using it at the end of a post full of advice was a sign that the author was providing information but knew...
Earlier this week Gmail announced they were providing reasons for why they delivered a particular mail to the bulk folder. I’m sure a lot of senders are rejoicing over the clear feedback. After all this is exactly what they’ve been asking for “tell us why you’re filtering our mail and we’ll fix it.” I am not sure, however, that this is going to help the...
There’s a concert promoter in London that’s been spamming me for years and years. Most of the time my spam filters take care of it and I never see their mail. Every once in a while, though, one of emails gets through and ends up in my inbox. Usually I move it to junk, curse at my filters for not getting it right and just go on with whatever I’m doing. I suspect this is more...
The Wall Street Journal reports that some large retailers are scaling back their email marketing. Benefits of sending less mail include higher open rates, lower unsubscribe rates and an increase in sales. Since cutting back its volume, Nicole Miller has seen the rate at which customers “unsubscribe”—or request to stop receiving emails—drop, and the percentage of recipients who open...
MAAWG is coming up and lots of us are working on documents, and presentations. One of the recent discussions is what kind of security recommendations, if any, should we be making. I posted a list of things including “Don’t browse the web with a machine running Windows.” Another participant told me he thought my recommendation to not use a windows machine to browse the web was...
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