Earlier this week Litmus and Fluent hosted a webinar title “Adapting to Consumers’ New Definition of Spam.” This had a number of fascinating facts about email marketing, many of which should reassure folks. Litmus has a blog post up highlighting some of the findings specific to millennials and email. Good news is millennials like getting mail from brands and interact with them...
iOS List Unsubscribe Functionality
Al did a great post over on Spamresource about the how the new list unsubscribe function in the default mail client from iOS10. What’s been interesting to me is how much I’m hearing from ESP folks about how their customers want it gone. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, in the default mail client on iOS10, Apple is now offering a way to unsubscribe from list mail...
Mail Client Improvements
There’s been extensive and ongoing development of email through the years, but much of it has been behind the scenes. We were focused on the technology and safety and robustness of the channel. We’re not done yet, but things are much better than they were. The good part of that is there is some space to make improvements to the inbox as well. Over the last few months there have been a...
NY Times on unsubscribing by email
More than a decade ago I was included in one of these. It wasn’t work related per se, but the address list included a lot of experienced, BTDT, names-on-RFCs technology folks.
Yeah, even they got stuck in the mess of replying all, unsubscribing, lecturing people about not replying to all. It was a mess, but funny given the names involved. #neverdothis #noreplytoall
iOS mail supporting list-unsub header
Al over at SpamResource reports that the next generation of Apple’s iOS has support for the list unsubscribe header.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time an independent email client has built in support for the List-Unsubscribe header. Microsoft and Google support it, but only in their webmail system. Hopefully other mail clients will follow suit.
Ask Laura: What about Transactional Opt-Outs?
Dear Laura, We are having a bit of an internal struggle on our end as we launch our new quarterly account summaries. What are your views on including an unsubscribe link in these emails? My personal opinion is that we should. Although the summaries can be classified as “transactional”, they are not tied to a specific recent transaction a customer made and can be viewed as a general...
Ask Laura: Confused about CAN SPAM
Dear Laura, I read your blog post about CAN SPAM earlier this week, and there’s one thing that confuses me. You never mention that harvesting addresses is a violation. I’ve seen many other people, including lawyers, assert that harvesting addresses is a violation of CAN SPAM. Why did you leave that out? Signed, Hopeful maker of musubi Dear Hopeful, The idea that harvesting is, in and...
Doing it right
It’s that time of the year – marketers send more email than usual, recipients unsubscribe from their lists. Clicking on the unsubscription link in the email I just received took me to an unsubscription landing page. The box for my email address was prepopulated based on the cookie in the unsubscription link, the default setting is to unsubscribe me from all mail from the sender and...
Monitoring Your Mail Stream
One of the most important things for any mail sender to do is monitor their mail stream. There are a number of things that every mailer should pay attention to. Some are things to monitor during delivery, some are things to monitor after delivery. All of these things tell senders important information about how their mail is being received by their recipients and the ISPs. What to monitor during...
Testing your opt-out process
When was the last time you tested your opt-out process? Did you just click the unsubscribe link to see if the page loaded? How did you confirm the email address was unsubscribed? If you have a Gmail account, Gmail allows you to use unlimited aliases. For example, if your Gmail email address is josh@gmail.com, you can add the + symbol to your email address to create an alias. An example of an...