VERP

Useful bits of Cryptography – Hashes

• steve
• Technical

More than just PGP

Cryptography is the science of securing communication from adversaries. In the email world it’s most obvious use is tools like PGP or S/MIME that are used to encrypt a message so that it can only be read by the intended recipient, or to sign a message so that the recipient can be sure of who it came from. There are quite a few other aspects of sending email where a little cryptography is useful or essential, though – bounce management, suppression lists, unsubscription handling, DKIM and DMARC, amongst others.

Six best practices for every mailer

• laura
• Best practices

People get into all sorts of details when talking about best practices. But so much of email depends on the type of email and the target market and the goals of the sender. It’s difficult to come up with universal best practices.
I’ve said in the past that I think that best practices are primarily technical. I don’t believe there is a best frequency or a best time to send mail or a best image to text ratio.
My top 6 best practices every marketer should be doing (and too few are).

Clicktracking link abuse

• steve
• Best practices

If you use redirection links in the emails you send out, where a click on the link goes to your server – so you can record that someone clicked – before redirecting to the real destination, then you’ve probably already thought about how they can be abused.
Redirection links are simple in concept – you include a link that points to your webserver in email that you send out, then when recipients click on it they end up at your webserver. Instead of displaying a page, though, your webserver sends what’s called a “302 redirect” to send the recipients web browser on to the real destination. How does your webserver know where to redirect to? There are several different ways, with different tradeoffs: