Evaluating usability at an ESP

Clients and random people often ask me to recommend an ESP based on “the best delivery.” I usually point out that most of the reputable ESPs are similar in terms of their delivery. There aren’t many widely used reputation services that block based on ESPs unless there is long term and ongoing problem from the ESP.
This is even more true when the ESP uses dedicated IPs for customers. ESPs that use shared IPs can have poor delivery if they don’t effectively police customers and lower the reputation of all their IP addresses.
My normal comment about ESPs is to find a price point and feature set that meets the client’s needs. Clickmail has a good post about how to evaluate an ESP for usability.

Boston police using email to warn residents
Password security

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Gmail reports spear phishing attack

No one, it seems, is immune from account compromise attempts. Today Google reported they had identified a systemic campaign to compromise Gmail accounts belonging to “senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists.”
Google offers a number of solutions for users, including the ability to add 2 factor authentication to your Gmail account. I strongly recommend anyone who uses Gmail to do this.
This isn’t a security blog, but email is one of the major vectors used to infect machines. We’ve seen numerous break ins targeting email senders and ESPs, resulting in customer and recipient data being stolen and then used for spam. Everyone who uses email needs to be aware of the risks and maintain their email account integrity. Be careful clicking links in emails. Be careful opening webpages. Keep your antivirus software up to date.
Everyone is a target.
 

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Just go read here…

I wrote earlier this week about bad ways to evaluate and choose an ESP. It was all going to end today in an insightful and profound post telling all of you exactly how to find the best ESP.
Then Smartinsights published an insightful and useful article on choosing an ESP yesterday.
So, yeah, just go read what Jordie has to say. I have a couple other things to add, but I’ll drop those in another post.

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Spamming ESPs

In my mailbox there is a definite uptick in spam from ESPs advertising their services.
Today’s email was from a company that has the following in their anti-spam policy:

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