January 2017: The Month in Email

Between client work and our national political climate, it’s been a very busy month around here and blogging has been light. Things show no sign of slowing down in February, so we’d love to hear from you with questions and suggestions of what you’d most like to see us focus on in our limited blogging time this month. We got a great question about how senders can access their Google Postmaster tools, and I wrote up a guide that you might find useful.

We’re also revisiting some older posts on often-requested topics, such as spamtraps, so feel free to comment below if there are topics you’d like us to address or update. One topic that comes up frequently, both on the blog and in our consulting practice, is about what to do when you’re on a blocklist. I revisited an old-but-still-relevant post on that topic as well.
On the Best Practices front, I wrote about how brands can use multiple channels to connect with customers and prospective customers to promote and enhance email delivery. I also took a moment to look back over 2016 and forward to 2017 in the realm of email security.
I continue to be annoyed by B2B spam, and have started responding to those “requests” for my time directly. Steve also wrote a long post about B2B spam, focusing on how these spammers are using Google and Amazon to try to work around reputation issues.
In case you missed it, I contributed some thoughts to a discussion on 2017 email trends over at Freshmail with my exhortation to “Make 2017 the year you turn deliverability into a KPI.”
I’m also still in the process of completing my 2017 speaking schedule, so I’m looking for any can’t-miss conferences and events you’d recommend. Thanks for keeping in touch!

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May 2014: The month in email

It’s been a busy and exciting month for us here.
Laura finished a multi-year project with M3AAWG, the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (look for the results to be published later this year) and continued working with clients on interesting delivery challenges and program opportunities. Steve focused on development on the next version release of Abacus, our flagship abuse desk tool, which will also be available later this year.
And as always, we had things to say about email.
The World of Spam and Email Best Practices
We started the month with a bit of a meta-discussion on senders’ fears of being labeled spammers, and reiterated what we always say: sending mail that some people don’t want doesn’t make you evil, but it is an opportunity to revisit your email programs and see if there are opportunities to better align your goals with the needs of people on your email lists. We outlined how we’ve seen people come around to this position after hitting spamtraps. That said, sometimes it is just evil. And it’s still much the same evil it’s been for over a decade.
We also wrote a post about reputation, which is something we get asked about quite frequently. We have more resources on the topic over at the WiseWords section of our site.
Gmail, Gmail, Gmail
Our friends over at Litmus estimate Gmail market share at 12%, which seems pretty consistent with the percentage of blog posts we devote to the topic, yes? We had a discussion of Campaign Monitor’s great Gmail interview, and offered some thoughts on why we continue to encourage clients to focus on engagement and relevance in developing their email programs. We also wrote a post about how Gmail uses filters, which is important for senders to understand as they create campaigns.
SMTP and TLS
Steve wrote extensively this month about the technical aspects of delivery and message security. This “cheat sheet” on SMTP rejections is extremely useful for troubleshooting – bookmark it for the next time you’re scratching your head trying to figure out what went wrong.
He also wrote a detailed explanation of how TLS encryption works with SMTP to protect email in transit, and followed that with additional information on message security throughout the life of the message. This is a great set of posts to explore if you’re thinking about security and want to understand potential vulnerabilities.
DKIM
Steve also wrote a series of posts about working with DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), the specification for signing messages to identify and claim responsibility for messages. He started with a detailed explanation of DKIM Replay Attacks, which happens when valid email is forwarded or otherwise compromised by spammers, phishers or attackers. Though the DKIM signature persists (by design) through a forward, the DKIM specification restricts an attacker’s ability to modify the message itself. Steve’s post describes how senders can optimize their systems to further restrict these attacks. Another way that attackers attempt to get around DKIM restrictions is by injecting additional headers into the message, which can hijack a legitimately signed message. If you’re concerned about these sort of attacks (and we believe you should be), it’s worth learning more about DKIM Key Rotation to help manage this. (Also of note: we have some free DKIM management tools available in the WiseTools section of our site.)
As always, we’re eager to hear from you if there are topics you’d like us to cover in June.

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December 2014: The month in email

2014 has been a busy and exciting year at Word to the Wise (look for more on that in a year-end wrap-up post next week!) and this month was particularly thrilling for us as we officially doubled our size with the addition of Josh and Meri on our client services team.
If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you’ve probably spotted Josh’s byline on a few posts: Google’s Inbox Team answers questions on Reddit, which looks at what this new email client portends for both consumers and email marketers, and M3AAWG Recommends TLS, which reviews M3AAWG’s recommendation that mailbox providers phase out SSL encryption in favor of TLS. Look for more smart insights from Josh in 2015.
Steve contributed a post on the proper syntax for displaying a friendly email address, and a very helpful guide for generating useful test data that doesn’t compromise personally identifiable information from your actual customer data. He also detailed the brief DBL false positive from Spamhaus’ new “Abused-Legit” sub-zone and best practices for handling unrecognized responses.
I wrote about some of the subtleties inherent in how brands decide to “converse” with customers in email and other channels. We’ll just keep saying it: companies need to respect the inbox as personal space. I want to thank both Steve and Josh for picking up my slack on blogging. 7+ years is a long time to try and say new things on the blog and I needed a bit of a break.

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November 2016: The Month In Email

Happy December! Between #blackfriday, #cybermonday & #givingtuesday, pretty much everyone in the US has just survived a week of email from every brand and organization they’ve ever interacted with. Phew.
TurkeysforBlog
Is this still the best strategy for most senders? Maybe. But it’s always important to be adaptable and continue to evaluate and evolve your strategy as you move through the year.
As always, I continue to think about evolving our own strategies, and how we might best support senders and ESPs. One of the challenges we face when we talk to senders with deliverability questions is that so many of our answers fall into a nebulous “it depends” zone. We’re trying to articulate new ways to explain that to people, and to help them understand that the choices and details they specify at each point of their strategic planning and tactical execution have ramifications on their delivery. While “it depends” is still a correct answer, I’m going to try to avoid it going forward, and instead focus on exploring those choices and details with senders to help them improve deliverability.
In our community of deliverability and anti-abuse professionals, we are — as you’d expect — quite sensitive to unsolicited email that targets our industry. When an email circulates, even what seems like a reasonably well-thought-out email, it occasionally does not land well. Worse still are the various email-related product and service providers who try to legitimize B2B sales messaging as if it is something other than spam.
The takeaway from these discussions for senders is, as always: know your audience. This post about research from Litmus on millennials and spam is a great example of the kinds of things you might consider as you get to know your audience and how they prefer to communicate.
We also had a presidential election this month, one that made much of issues related to email, and it will be interesting to see how the candidates and parties use the email data they collected going forward.
In industry and security news, we saw over a million Google accounts breached by Android malware. We also saw some of the ramifications of a wildcard DNS entry from a domain name expiration — it’s an interesting “how things work” post if you’re curious. In other “how things work” news, we noted some of the recent changes AOL made to its FBL.
I answered an Ask Laura question about dedicated IP pools, and I have a few more queued up as well. As always, we want to know what questions are on the minds of our readers, so please feel free to send them over!

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