Speaking

Deliverability mythbusting

Recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Jillian Bowen and talking about deliverability for her podcast.

Well, it’s 2020. The start of a new year and a new decade, or not depending on what number theory you use to count decades. Personally, I think we, as pattern loving humans, just happen to love numbers that end with 0 and we’re going to consider it special whether or not it’s the actual end or start of a decade.

Hitting the ground running

We’ve landed in Dublin and are back at work. Blogging will pick up as I get back into the swing of things.

Speaking in June

ActiveCampaign is hosting their very first user conference in Chicago in June. I am honored to be a part of their speaker lineup.
Early bird registration only $450 through April 30.

Women. Technology. Moving Forward.

A little over a year ago, Kristin Bond posted an article (reprinted here) looking at the diversity of speakers at marketing conferences. As with many articles pointing out gender issues in technology there was quite a bit of discussion about it on a related mailing list. Some of the comments were supportive and open to the idea that gender diversity is an overall good. Some of the comments, while well meaning, indicated the commenters didn’t understand some of the more systemic issues that result in conferences with speaker lists that consist primarily of white men.
Kristin, I, Jen Capstraw and April Mullen started talking privately about the issue. What I discovered during those conversations is that I wasn’t alone in how I felt about some spaces. Being a woman in tech I expect to feel left out in many places. When I go to a conference, or I participate in an online space or I meet up with colleagues in social situations, I expect that someone will say something sexist. As a woman I regularly feel like an outsider. What I didn’t realize is other women in those same spaces felt the same way. By not saying something I was missing an opportunity to find a supportive atmosphere with other women who also thought spaces were unfriendly or toxic to women.
But we didn’t just complain; we decided to take action. What would happen if we created a space to help conferences find women speakers? What would happen if we set up a framework for women to find mentors? What did we have to lose by trying? Thus, Women of Email™ was formed.

ESPC meeting

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending my first ESPC semi-annual meeting. I was scheduled to talk on a panel about list hygiene with a couple vendors. Because some folks didn’t make it, I also sat on the panel talking about blocklists.
It was a fun day. I got to meet and talk with some colleagues I haven’t seen in an age. And I met some new faces and had interesting interactions.
One bonus from the day is I really got the chance to talk with some of the list hygiene vendors that were on the panel with me. Afterwards, we spent a good hour just discussing the space and the players in it. I learned a lot from that conversation. Previously, I’d kept the list hygiene vendors at arms length. My experiences with them and with their products weren’t very positive. My experience has primarily been with clients who have used these services and not gotten what they thought they were paying for. I have also seen some internet-abusive behavior from a few. Many years ago a few of the companies approached me for deliverability advice as they were running into consistent blocking.
All of these things led me to the conclusion that it was a part of the email space I didn’t want much to do with.
Yesterday, though, I learned that there were vendors in the space that focused very much on being a net benefit to the overall network. Both Webbula and Kickbox, who were on the panel with me, have policies and processes designed to make it unattractive for spammers to sign up for their services. We did agree there were problems with some of the vendors in the space, but I realized that some is not all.
It was a good meeting, I’m glad I went.

Conferences and Events?

What are readers favorite conferences and events around email and marketing? I’m starting to plan out my schedule for this year. I did a lot of talks at familiar places last year, and I’m looking to find some new places.
Tell me your favorite conferences in the comments.

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.

October 2016: The Month in Email

We’ve returned from London, where I spoke at the Email Innovations Summit and enjoyed a bit of vacation. My wrap-up post also mentions an article I wrote for the Only Influencers site, which looks at questions I get asked frequently: “Why does spam make it to the inbox and our legitimate marketing email doesn’t? Should we just copy their tactics?”

In industry news, Yahoo caught our attention for two surprising moves: disabling forwarding and — much more disturbing — creating software for intelligence agencies to search customer email.
Some legal updates this month: The Second Court of Appeals upheld an earlier ruling that companies are in fact liable for the activities of their affiliates, including spam and fraudulent claims. This is important, as we often see spammers and cybercriminals use affiliates to distance themselves from these activities. We also saw another fine assessed for a violation of CASL, and noted with appreciation the transparency and thoughtful process that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) demonstrates in explaining their actions.
Another excellent report is the one created by the Exploratorium to explain their recent experience with being phished. It’s a good piece to share with your organization, in that it reminds us that these cybercriminals are exploiting not just our technology but our trust-based connections to our friends and colleagues. It’s important to raise awareness about social engineering as a part of information security. And speaking of email security, we were delighted to note that André Leduc received the 2016 J.D. Falk award this month at M³AAWG for his excellent work on this topic. It’s a fitting legacy to our friend, J.D., who died five years ago this month. We miss him.
Finally, we’d be remiss in observing Halloween without a post about zombies. Feel free to read it aloud in your spookiest voice.

And… we're back from London

The Email Innovations Summit in London was a good conference. Much smaller than Vegas, but with a number of very interesting talks. I got to meet a number of folks I’ve only known online and we had some interesting conversations at the conference and at the pub-track in the evenings.

I had so many grand plans for doing some work while in London. So many plans. And then I actually mostly disconnected and ignored anything I “should” be doing. Instead, Steve and I did some touristing, some relaxing, some family time and some connecting with his college friends. We also (over)heard a lot of conversations about the US Election. One night at dinner every table around us was talking about our candidates and what they thought of them. It’s always interesting to hear what non-Americans think about our country.
In addition to missing two debates, it seems we missed some online news, too. I think the biggest thing was another large DDoS attack against that took out many major websites. I’m starting to see some comments that spam levels were down during the attack, too, but haven’t dug into that yet.
I did have an article published in the Only Influencers newsletter last week: Marketers Can’t Learn from Spam. All too often marketers think spammers are better at unboxing because they see spam in their inbox. But spammers are just more criminal and spend a lot of effort trying to bypass filters. These aren’t lessons marketers can learn from.
Unfortunately, due to our London trip, we are going to miss M³AAWG in Paris, which starts today. Two weeks between conferences was exactly the wrong time for going to both. Never fear, many folks will be tweeting what they can using #m3aawg38.
We’re both slowly getting back into the swing (and timezone!) of back to work. Blogging will pick up over the next few days. And I have new castle pictures to share.

Upcoming events

Next month I’ll be in London for the Email Innovations Summit. This will be an updated version of what you need to know to talk with technical folks.
In early December I’ll be doing a DMA webinar discussing the subscription bombings. That’s still in the works.
I’m looking at some events for next year. I am planning on being at M³AAWG in San Francisco in February.
I’m looking at others, too. What are your favorite events?

Back from Vegas

Had a wonderful time at the Email Innovations conference last week. Got a chance to see some familiar faces and meet a lot of new ones.
There is so much new and interesting and exciting stuff going on in the world of email. I think we’re hitting another period for real growth and innovation that’s going to change what we see in our inboxes and how we use email.

Deliverability session at Connections 2016

If you’re at Connections 2016 stop by our session at 3:00 in the Sidney Marcus Auditorium. Bring your pressing deliverability questions.

Upcoming events for Laura

We’re more than halfway through April. Good: Taxes are finished. Bad: Wait? We’re well into Q2? How time files. With that realization, it seems like it’s a good time to share some of the places and events I’ll be at in May.
Salesforce Connections in Atlanta, GA. May 10 – 12. I’m a panelist for Deliverability Unplugged: How to Stay out of Email Jail and Other Best Practices on May 11. I’m sharing the panel with Mickey Chandler from SFMC and Melinda Plemel from Return Path. The session will be moderated by Rebecca McAdams from Forrester Research. Bring questions. I don’t think you really want to just listen to us show you slides, so come bearing questions.
As an aside, Salesforce is offering a discount of 50% off registration for Connections16 through April 22 if you use the promo code EQUALITY. Good on Salesforce for this.
Email Innovations Summit in Las Vegas, NV. May 17 – 18. Understanding your IT Department: What Non-Technical Brand Managers Need to Know about Email Security, DMARC , ISPs and Delivery. I’ve been working on this talk and, wow, there’s a lot of info I want to share. It should be a fun session, so stop by.
You can get a 15% discount off the cost of registration for Innovations by using my speaker code SPKATK

Podbox Expert Interview Series

Last month I did an interview with Podbox about email, deliverability and how I became an email expert (breaking things, lots of breaking things… and having to pick up the pieces and fix them…)
Check out the interview over on their website.

I’ve been thinking a lot about history and longevity. Next year will mark 10 years of the Word to the Wise blog and 20 years of me entering the anti-spam / deliverability space. That’s a lot of time. When I first started fighting spam it was really about my mailbox and getting rid of the junk I was receiving. At the time, a lot of people thought it was silly to spend so much effort fighting spam.
But as time as gone on, email spam and fraud became a big deal. Criminals realized they could use spam to further their gains at the expense of people. Spam is a network problem. Spam is a danger.
Personally, I’ve moved away from fighting spam. I’m now working more on making and keeping email a useful tool. Yes, that does include commercial email. Yes, it does include bulk email. Helping people get the mail they want in their inbox is a part of keeping the email ecosystem healthy. It’s the part I can do and the part I am good at.
Seeing email become such an important part of commerce, communication and modern life has been a journey. I look forward to seeing where the next 20 years takes us.

My panels from #EEC16

I had the privilege to be a part of two panels at EEC16, with some of the best folks in the business.
The first panel was “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Deliverability, but Were Afraid to Ask.”
We had a lot of great audience questions.
The first question, which was awesome (and I don’t think planted) was: “What is the most important thing we can do to improve our deliverability?”
All of us had really similar answers: pay attention to your data and your acquisition. Deliverability starts with your data: good data = good deliverability, poor data = poor deliverability. How you acquire addresses is vital to any email program.
I’ve had dozens of sales calls with potential clients over the years. Most of them tell me lots of stuff about their marketing program. I hear details of engagement, data hygiene, response rates, CTRs, bounce handling. But very, very few people spontaneously tell me how they’re acquiring addresses. That’s so backwards. Start with acquiring addresses the right way. Deliverability is all in the acquisition step. Of course, you need to nurture and care for those subscribers, sent the right message at the right time and all the good things we talk about. None of that matters if you don’t start with good data.
Another question was about spamtraps. The panel had me take this one. I’ve written extensively about spamtraps and what they do and what they mean. The important thing to remember, though, is that a spamtrap is a signal. If you have spamtraps on your list, then there is a problem with your data acquisition. Somehow, people are getting addresses that do not belong to them on the list.
Spamtraps are a problem, but not for the reasons many people think they are problems. Folks get upset when their mail is blocked because of spamtraps. Blocking isn’t the only damage, though. For every spamtrap on a list that is one less responsive addresses. It’s one customer who you are not reaching. If there are spamtraps on a list, it’s likely there are deliverable addresses that don’t belong to your customers, too. These recipients are going to view that mail as spam. They didn’t sign up, they didn’t ask for it, they don’t want it. They’re going to complain, hurting your reputation. Too many of these recipients and delivery will suffer.
Spamtraps are a warning that something is wrong. That something is usually your data acquisition process.
Questions went on through the session and ranged from things like how to get mail to B2B inboxes and is there value in certification. We also had some insightful questions about authentication.
The second panel I was on was the closing keynote panel: “ISP Postmasters & Blacklist Operators: Defending Consumer Inboxes.” This was where I got to show my incoming mail chops, a bit. I was a last minute fill in for the panel and I am honored that Dennis and Len thought I could represent the incoming mail folks. It’s not like I’m out there writing filters, but I do pay attention to what the filter operators are saying and doing.
I think it is important for marketers to get a feel for what’s really going on at the ISPs. They aren’t trying to stop real mail, they’re trying to stop malicious mail. Matt from Comcast talked a lot about how marketers and ISPs share customers and the ISPs are trying to keep those customers safe and happy. Jaren discussed some of the decision making processes his company goes through deciding whether to err on the side of letting spam through or filtering good mail. Tom discussed how his blocklist works with some brands to help stop phishing attacks against those brands.
Overall, I think the session was a great success. The conference was great and I am looking forward to going back next year.
Were you at either panel? What did you think?
+eddc

Prepping for EEC

Tomorrow I head off to New Orleans to the EEC conference. It’s my first one and I’m really looking forward to meeting some of the people I only know online.
I’ll be speaking on two panels on Friday:
All You Ever Wanted to Know about Deliverability (But Were Afraid to Ask) at 10:50. This is your chance to ask those questions of myself and other experts in the field. I always enjoy Q&A panels and actually hearing from folks what their big deliverability questions are. (and remember, if you have a question, you can always send one to me for Ask Laura)
and the closing Keynote panel
ISP Postmasters & Blacklist Operators: Defending Consumer Inboxes at 1:10. I’m on a panel with various ISP postmasters, blacklist operators and we’ll be talking about what it’s like dealing with the deluge of mail. For instance, there is a huge outbreak of bot-spam at the moment, and a lot of the filters are struggling to keep up. In fact, I’m a last minute replacement for one filter company as they are in all-hands-on-deck firefighting mode to keep their customers safe.
Hope to see you there!

Laura's Speaking Events early 2016

My speaking schedule is coming together for Q1 and Q2 this year.

Email Evolution Conference. March 30 – April 1. New Orleans, LA. I’ll be participating on the “All You Ever Wanted to Know about Deliverability (But Were Afraid to Ask)” panel Friday Morning. The other panelists are Chris Arrendale, Alyssa Nahatis and Matthew Vernhout. This panel should be quite a bit of fun, as we all know each other and have collaborated in the past. I’m looking forward to it. Come prepared with questions!
Salesforce Connections. May 10 – 12. Atlanta, GA. Another panel on deliverability, this time with Mickey Chandler from SFMC and Melinda Plemel from ReturnPath. We’ll each bet giving our 3 best tips to improve deliverability and then be taking questions from the audience. We have all been around a long time, in fact Mickey used to work for me at MAPS back in 2000. We’re all ready to answer those questions you’ve always had but never known who to ask.
Email Innovations Summit. May 17 – 19. Las Vegas, NV. Not a panel! I’ll be speaking about the technical things happening around email that will affect sending, marketing and deliverability. If you ever wanted to know how to talk to the technical folks this is the session to come to. I’ll be explaining some of the terminology and teaching attendees what they need to care about and what they just need to know exists. Register with my code (SPKATK) and save 15%.

Q1 2016: Upcoming events

While we’re working on a Speaking Schedule page for my upcoming events, I’ll just update the blog. My schedule for Q1 and Q2 is coming together.
M³AAWG 36: San Francisco, February 16 – 18th. I’ll be up on Monday afternoon. No official speaking at this one, just sitting in the audience and listening. But stop by and say hi!
Email Evolution Conference: Hosted by the EEC, New Orleans, March 30 – April 1. I’ll be on the panel Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Email (But Were Afraid To Ask) with some of my favorite colleagues.
Email Innovations Conference: Las Vegas, May 18 – 19th. Understanding Your IT Department: What Non-Technical Brand Managers Need To Know about Email Security, DMARC, ISP’s and Delivery.

Email Innovations Summit in May 2016

I’ve been accepted as a speaker for the Email Innovations Summit in Las Vegas in May. This is a conference hosted by the folks behind the Only Influencers group and should be a great way to meet some of the leading minds in email marketing.
I’ll be speaking on some of the things I see changing in the email space and how that will affect email marketing as a whole. I think it will be great fun and look forward to meeting many of my OI colleagues.

10 experts in 50 minutes: predictions for 2016

I’m thrilled to be one of the email experts speaking at the 2016 predictions webinar hosted by SparkPost.
Come join us!

November 2015: The month in email

As we head into the last month of the year, we look back at our November adventures. I spoke twice this month, first at Message Systems Insight in Monterey (my wrap-up post is here) and then with Ken Magill at the at the 2015 All About eMail Virtual Conference & Expo (a short follow-up here, and a longer post on filters that came out of that discussion here.). Both were fun and engaging — it’s always great to get a direct sense of what challenges are hitting people in the email world, and to help clear up myths and misconceptions about what works and doesn’t work in email marketing and delivery. I’m putting together my conference and speaking schedule for 2016 — if you know of anything interesting that should be on my radar, please add it in the comments, thanks!
In industry news, we noted a sharp uptick in CBL listings, and then posted about the explanation for the false positives. Steve wrote about an interesting new Certificate Authority (CA) called Let’s Encrypt, which looks to be a wonderful (and much-needed) alternative for certificates, and I put together some thoughts on SenderScore.
Steve and I did a few posts in parallel this month. First, Steve posted an interesting exercise in SPF debugging. Are you seeing mail from legitimate senders flagged as spam? This might be why. My investigative post was about ISP rejections, and how you can figure out where the block is occurring. In each case, you’ll get a glimpse of how we go about identifying and troubleshooting issues, even when we don’t have much to go on.
We each also wrote a bit about phishing. Steve posted a timely warning about spear phishing — malware attacks disguised as legitimate email from within your organization — and reminds all of us to be careful about attachments. With all of the more secure options for document sharing these days, it’s a lot easier to avoid the risk by maintaining a no-attachments policy in your company. And I wrote about how the Department of Defense breaking HTML links in email to help combat phishing. If your lists include military addresses (.mil), you may want to come up with a strategy for marketing to those recipients that relies less on a clickthrough call to action.
We amused ourselves a bit with a game of Deliverability Bingo, then followed up with a more serious look at the thing we hear all the time — “I’m sure they’ll unblock me if I can just explain my business model.” While an ESP abuse desk is unlikely to be swayed by this strategy, it is actually at the core of how we think about deliverability at Word to the Wise. Legitimate senders have many kinds of lists, many kinds of recipients, many kinds of marketing strategies, and many kinds of business goals. For us to help marketers craft sustainable email programs, we need to understand exactly what matters most to our clients.

Thanks for the great session

I had a great time answering questions at the 2015 All About eMail Virtual Conference & Expo today. Thanks so much to everyone who participated and asked questions. They were great and I’m sorry we didn’t have more time.
I did get some questions on twitter (@wise_laura) afterwards. One was about an example I gave to explain how filters are complex. There have been rumors going around recently that Gmail is filtering mail with more than 3 URLs in it. Let me just say right now THIS IS NOT TRUE emails with more than 3 URLs in them are being delivered just fine to Gmail.
There is a situation involving the number (and type) of URLs that I think are a useful example of the filter complexity happening at some places, like Gmail. I started working on it, but don’t quite have time to finish it today, but will keep working on and it should go up in the next day or so.
Thanks again to everyone who joined the session. You asked some great questions and I had fun answering them.

All About Email: Q & A session tomorrow

Live! Tomorrow! the 2015 All About eMail Virtual Conference & Expo. 12:30 Eastern, 9:30 Pacific. Come hear Ken ask me about email and contribute your own questions!
Want to ask about spamtraps? Purchased lists? How about engagement? Just want to listen to what myths other people are interested in asking about? Come and listen.

Deliverability, email and lessons learned from Insight2015

Deliverability is a challenge, I think everyone who has ever tried to send bulk mail will acknowledge that. There are a lot of reasons for this. One of the big reasons is that there are bad players who spend a lot of time trying to get around filters. And a lot of these people are sending very bad mail. Phishing. Spear Phishing. Viruses. Malware.
Email is a prime vector for a lot of criminals.
A lot of deliverability discussions really gloss over the dangers, though. We don’t often think about it, because we’re not sending bad mail. But we still have to go through the same filters that ask: Is this message safe?
Security was a big deal at the recent Sparkpost / MessageSystems conference.

Insight 2015 and upcoming talks

In about an hour I will be heading down to Monterey to give a talk at the MessageSystems Insight 2015 conference.
I really wanted to go to the whole conference, as I’ve heard great things about previous ones. It just didn’t work with my schedule. I’ll be around this afternoon and tomorrow morning, though. So if you’re there, do drop by and say Hi!
If you’re not at Insight, but are interested in hearing me speak, you can join us on November 12 at the 2015 All About eMail Virtual Conference & Expo. Ken Magill will be interviewing me about email and delivery. The session is also very open to audience questions, so come with some of your own.

Truths and Myths about email deliverability

Ken Magill will be interviewing me on the Truths and Myths of Email Deliverability, November 12 at the 2015 All About eMail Virtual Conference & Expo. Ken has a bunch of questions he wants to ask me, but he’s also expecting to take a lot of questions from the audience as well.
Speaking of myths, there has been discussion lately about recycled spamtraps. Apparently, there are people who believe (believed?) that every ISP uses recycled spamtraps. When Hotmail and Gmail said recently they didn’t use recycled traps people got very upset that they believed something that was not true.
It’s a mess. There is so much about email that is like a version of telephone. One person says “hotmail uses recycled spamtraps” someone else repeats “big ISPs use recycled spamtraps” then then third person says “all ISPs use recycled spamtraps.” People try and correct this type of misinformation all the time but sometimes it’s hard to clarify.
So show up to our session and let Ken lob questions at me, lob some of your own and we can see what myths we can clear up.

We're hiring again and travel

We’re looking for a new employee. Full job details are available on our career page.
I’m excited with how the company is growing and developing. I’m looking forward to seeing the candidates and what they can bring to us.
For those of you going to the APSIS Email Marketing Evolved conference next week, I hope you will stop by and introduce yourself. I’ll be presenting at the pre-conference and the keynote the day of the conference.
That does mean blogging will likely be light next week. But I always come back from conferences energized and full of ideas and things to write about.