News
Back at it
Back at the office after traveling to visit a bunch of our US friends recently. A lot of news, both in and out of the email space, happened while we were gone. The biggest stories are outside the email space and I will admit to following the coronavirus news probably closer than I should. (My graduate work was done across the hall from one of the major avian epidemic monitoring labs. This is the kind of thing we discussed at lunch and over beers.)
Read MoreEmail news today
Ironport have rolled out an update to their rule engine which has a bug causing mail problems. According to discussion on the mailop list, the new rule engine is folding the header with a line feed (LF) rather than a carriage return (CRLF). This is breaking things, including DKIM signatures. Ironport is aware of the issue. I expect an updated rollout shortly.
Read MoreNews in the email space
Various things happening in the email space recently that are worth mentioning but don’t have enough to justify a whole blog post.
Verizon announced a new umbrella company for the AOL and Yahoo media properties, including things like Engadget, Huffington Post. Based on the various press articles I’ve seen this doesn’t appear to affect the email handling for either set of domains.
Industry news
Just some stuff going on around email that probably merit a mention but not a whole blog post.
Next Tuesday at 1 eastern I’ll be giving a webinar on the subscription bombing and discussing what companies can do to mitigate the problem.
Google is working on new “invisible” captchas, that separate out humans from bots without humans having to do anything.
EmailonAcid created an interactive puzzle email.
Return Path acquired Email Copilot. Then laid off approximately 60 employees citing restructuring (no links for this one, but emails were sent to customers and someone forwarded me a copy).
Mailchimp sent 1.5 billion emails on Black Friday, and published stats and information about how well they delivered and performed.
The hard sell works
Ken Magill, dad extraordinaire, describes how he went above and beyond the call to get his son a DVD while battling hard sell marketing techniques.
Read MoreRecent email marketing news
Apparently mentioning “affiliate” in a blog post brings out the blog spammers. I’ve had dozens of trackbacks on yesterday’s how to avoid affiliate spam. Oh, the irony.
A bucket of announcements came out over the last week.
The uber smart folks at Mailchimp have a new iPad app called Chimpadeedoo. This app lets merchants collect email addresses at the point of sale, on an iPad sitting next to the register. Given the troubles my clients have run into when trying to collect addresses in their brick and mortars, this is definitely a product whose time has come.
Venkat talks about a few anti-spam cases making their way through California courts and how the courts seem to be siding with the plaintiffs recently.
On the lawsuit front, John Levine posts about peacefire.org losing an anti-spam case due to the Gordon v. Virtumundo case.
ReturnPath and Liveclicker have partnered to bring video to email. I know marketers are all for video in email, but I can’t get excited about it. I read fast and videos always seem to take to long to watch. I don’t have a feel, though, for how much the average email recipient wants video in their mailbox.
Stephanie Miller from ReturnPath has a summary of a talk given by representatives from Hotmail and Yahoo at the Email Insider’s Summit sponsored by Mediapost. Both ISPs emphasized the need for senders to engage their recipients.
News and announcements: March 1, 2010
Some news stories and links today.
Spamhaus has announced their new domain block list (DBL). The DBL is a list of domains that have been found in spam.
News from MAAWG
During MAAWG a number of companies in the email space announce new initiatives, mergers, products and the like. This MAAWG is no different.
Spammers adjust to security trends. This is not really news, spammers have been adjusting to new security measures since folks started blocking from: addresses back in ’95 and ’96. The tactics are different and developing, but for every security hole that is blocked, spammers will search for another hole to exploit. The unfortunate truth is that end user is the weak point, and spammers and scammers are very very good at social engineering.
Spam statistics stalemate. Spam is still accounting for approximately 90% of all email traffic.
Cloudmark acquires Bizanga. I talked to some of the Cloudmark folks and they seem very excited with their acquisition of the Bizanga MTA and email technology.
Bizanga Storage announced. Bizanga Store is a scalable storage system brought to you by some of the people who were instrumental in building the Bizanga MTA acquired by Cloudmark.
ReturnPath announced partnership with RPost. Yet more ongoing changes in the certification field.
Sending too much mail
Not having policies restricting the amount of mail any customer or recipient receives may lead to higher spam complaint rates and blocking warns the DMA Email Marketing Council.
HT: Box of Meat