In 2010 Chad White declared best practices dead. Frankly, the term has always been too “big tent” to be truly useful. When “don’t buy email lists” and “use buttons for primary calls-to-action” are both best practices, it’s no wonder there’s confusion. What we need is new language that differentiates those practices that are a litmus test for...
Mickey Chandler has a great post up about Triage vs. Planning. Where he talks about the decisions you make differ depending on the context. It’s a good read, and I strongly encourage everyone to go give it a look. But his post led me to a post by Andrew Kordek at Trendline where he claims that there is an industry rule of thumb that says 6 months is the rule of thumb to define an inactive...
J.D. Falk posts over on the Return Path blog about the new proposed standard for expiring email. It’s an interesting concept, but like J.D. I don’t see it going very far.
Return Path recently announced changes to their certification program. They will no longer be certifying 3rd party mailers. We will no longer certify mail streams which are strictly comprised of “third-party marketing” email (e.g., email-based advertising that is not accompanied by content and is sent on behalf of a different company than the one to which the end user subscribed in...
Having just returned home from another conference, my head is full of new ideas, new thoughts and new projects. I enjoy seeing old friends, making new contacts and sharing ideas. One thing I don’t enjoy, though, is listening to senders and marketers complaining about how hard it is to be a sender because the ISPs will not tell them what standards they need to meet. If the ISPs would just tell us...
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...
There is a lot of buzz on twitter and the email blogs today about Microsoft’s decision to use the HTML rendering engine from MS Word in Outlook 2010 instead of the HTML rendering engine from Explorer. The people behind the Email Standards Project have set up FixOutlook.org and are asking people to join twitter to and tweet the fixoutlook.org URL to send a message to Microsoft. I’ve been thinking...
JD had a comment on my Valentines day semi-fluff post, that really summed up the reality for senders. He said Make sure your mail doesn’t look anything like spam — not just in the text and formatting, but in all of your mailing practices. Good advice, your mail will not be blocked if it does not look like spam. What kinds of things do I mean? Here are things that spammers do, that often non...
Yahoo has updated and modified their postmaster pages. They have also put a lot of work into clarifying their response codes. The changes should help senders identify and troubleshoot problems without relying on individual help from Yahoo. There is one major change that deserves its own discussion. Yahoo is now using the SBL, XBL and PBL to block connections from listed IP addresses. These are...
I can usually tell when one of the ISPs makes some change to their incoming spam filtering just by my call volume. The past few weeks the ISP in most of my calls has been Comcast. And, what do you know, they have made changes to how they are filtering email. According to their bounce message, Comcast is using ReturnPath’s proprietary SenderScore product to filter mail. Reports on thresholds...
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