Truths and myths about email

Seven myths and two truths about email
My favorite:

[myth] Engagement is the new reputation. Actually, reputation metrics have always been about engagement, which is what complaint data and sender reputation reflect.

Yes. This.
Reputation, permission, all of those things are a way to quantify one simple fact: Do recipients want this mail from this sender?
Send mail people want and generally it will get into the inbox. Send stuff they don’t want (or don’t care if it shows up or not) and suffer delivery problems.

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Keep subscribers happy

Mark Brownlow writes about engagement. “…the people we really need to keep happy are the subscribers.” Go read the whole thing.

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TWSD: Using FOIA requests for email addresses

Mickey has a good summary of what’s going on in Maine where the courts forced the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to sell the email addresses of license purchasers to a commercial company.
There isn’t permission associated with this and the commercial company has no pretense that the recipients want to receive mail from them. This is a bad idea and a bad way to get email addresses and is no better than spammers scraping addresses from every website mentioning “fishing” or “hunting.”

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Permission versus forgiveness

Stephanie at Return Path has a great blog post on permission and how permission is an ongoing process not a one time thing. There were a couple statements that really grabbed my attention.

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