Good Email Practices

GitHub signup

GitHub is a site where developers can share code with one another. It is widely used by open source developers. Their user base is made up of geeks and people who want a lot of control over their mailbox.
Their email signup process reflects the sensibilities of their market, without being difficult to manage or understand.

Handling SNDS requests

I’ve been working with a new client on getting them signed up for FBLs, whitelists and other sorts of monitoring. One of the places I recommended to them was signing up for the Hotmail Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) program. It’s been a while since I’ve gone through the process, so I decided to sign up our network space to give up to date instructions from to clients.
As part of the process, Microsoft confirms the request with the network owner. This is smart, it prevents the wrong people from getting access to delivery data. They use public records (ARIN and IP Whois data) to figure out the “network owner” and send an email to that person. In my case, the mail was sent to a role account at Hurricane Electric (he.net).
I asked for access, filling in “this is Laura from Word to the Wise and I am looking for access to our space.” The email address in the request was my @hotmail.com address. A few minutes later I checked my inbox to find an email from he.net.