News and links 12/31/09

We’re iced in here in DC so I’ve been catching up with some industry news while camped in front of a heater and the TV.
Best of the ESPs by Forrester Research. Congrats to ET and Responsys for coming out on top. The results, as reported by MediaPost, match reasonably well with my overall impressions of the industry (so they must be right!)
Return Path is rolling out a new version of SenderScore. A welcome change for those of us who regularly refer to an IP’s sender score and find it doesn’t match other data.
CAUCE has done a series of posts looking back at significant events in spam over the last decade.
Al has a retrospective on various data breaches affecting email addresses over the last few years.
Happy New Year, everyone!

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Links for Sept 10, 2009

As everyone else has been announcing, the Tucows FBL is taking applications from the general public. I’ve updated the ISP Information page to link to the signup as well.
Loren McDonald has a blog up at MediaPost talking about how the language marketers use (Blast!) affects how they are perceived in the industry. I think he’s quite correct. Many people on the senders side hear thing things marketers say and judge that the markters are contemptuous of not only the ISPs but also the recipients. Language matters!
Pivotal Veracity announced MailboxIQ this week. This technology allows senders to track what individual users do to their email. Senders are now able to measure inbox / bulk performance for their whole list, not just seed addresses. The delivery person in me thinks this will help senders make better decisions about engaged recipients and give them more data to send mail that recipients want. The rest of me is a bit unhappy with marketers finding a new way to invade people’s privacy. I’m just glad that I don’t use webmail except for handling client issues.
In other news, Mailchimp has been trolling through their client’s response data and discovered that recipients using gmail.com are more engaged and responsive than users at other domains.

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Blocked for phishing

A couple clients recently have had bounces from different places indicating that their mails were caught by the recipients’ anti-virus filter. These are some of my better clients sending out daily newsletters. They’ve been mailing for years and I know that they are not phishing. They asked me to investigate the bounce messages.
The information I had to work with was minimal. One bounce said:

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Links for 9/2/09

People are still talking about the White House spamming. At Al Iverson’s Spam Resource there are two posts, one from Jaren Angerbauer titled Guest Post: Email and the White House and another from Al himself titled White House Spam, Signup Forgery, and GovDelivery. Both are insightful discussions of the spam that the White House has been sending. Over at ReturnPath, Stephanie Miller talks about how the publicity surrounding the spam is great PR for permission.
Stefan Pollard has an article at ClickZ looking at how an apology email in response to a recipient visible email mistake can actually make the fallout worse.
Web Ink Now documents one recipient’s experience with a bad, but all too common, subscription practice.
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Don’t forget to participate in the DKIM implementation survey. For ESPs. For ISPs. Check back next week for results.

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