September 2017: The Month in Email

laura
Industry
October 9, 2017

Happy October! ‘Tis the season for “the scariest costumes to wear to an inbound marketing Halloween party”. Terrifying, right? A perfect occasion for spam-infused mai tais!

In other news from the blog in September, I wrote several posts about the Equifax breach, starting with the announcement of the compromise on September 7th and their utterly inadequate response, followed by more incompetence when they sent people to the wrong site to get assistance. I also noted some of the discussion around the various educational paths people working in information security have and why these are the wrong questions to ask.
Speaking of the various paths people take towards careers in email, I wrote a followup post on Shiva Ayyadurai, whose defamation suit around his claims to being the inventor of email was recently dismissed.
I wrote a few posts about Gmail, including a guide to improving Gmail delivery, and some specific advice on how to warm up your Gmail mailstream, which is somewhat different than other warmup processes. In other news on mail providers, it’s worth noting some recent changes Microsoft has made to various domains.
In best practices, Steve wrote about a nice series of emails we received following an online purchase and I wrote about properly monitoring your DMARC reports.
Every now and then, I like to return to the basics. My post on 10 Things Every Mailer Must Do is a handy overview to share with your team (or your customers, if you’re an ESP). If you’re having delivery challenges and haven’t tackled these top ten best practices, this is where you need to start. I wrote up some additional thoughts on how we think about deliverability that you might find useful as well.

Related Posts

April 2017: The Month in Email

April was a big travel month for us. I went to Las Vegas for meetings around the Email Innovations Summit and to New Orleans, where Steve spoke on the closing keynote panel for the EEC conference.
I wrote several posts this month about privacy and tracking, both in email and in other online contexts. It’s increasingly a fact of life that our behaviors are tracked, and I wrote about the need for transparency between companies and those they are tracking. More specifically, I talked about the tradeoffs between convenience and security, and how people may not be aware that they are making these tradeoffs when they use popular mailbox tools like unroll.me. The folks over at ReturnPath added a comment on that post about how they handle privacy issues with their mailbox tools.
Steve contributed several posts this month. First up, a due diligence story about how service providers might look more closely at potential customers for their messaging platforms to help curtail spam and other fraudulent activity. He also looked at the history of “/8” IP blocks, and what is happening to them as the internet moves to IPv6. Steve also added a note about his new DMARC Validation tool, which rounds out a suite of free tools we’ve made available on our site. And finally, he showcased a particularly great email subscription experience from Tor.com — have a look!
I highlighted another post about companies doing things right, this one by Len Shneyder over at Marketingland. In other best practices news, I talked about bounce handling again (I mentioned it last month too), and how complicated it can be. Other things that are complicated: responding to abuse complaints. Do you respond? Why or why not?
Our friends at Sendgrid wrote a great post on defining what spammers and other malicious actors do via email, which I think is a must-read for email marketers looking to steer clear of such activity. Speaking of malicious actors, I wrote two posts on the arrest of one of the world’s top email criminals, Peter Levashov, and speculation that he was involved in the Russian hacking activity around the US elections. We’re looking forward to learning more about that story as it unfolds.

October 2014 – The Month in Email

October was action-packed at WttW. We wrapped up some big and interesting client projects (look for some case studies soon!), attended another great M³AAWG conference, and made an exciting announcement that we’re hiring a deliverability specialist. The combination of these frees up some more of my time for blogging, which I’ve really missed. Look for more from me in November and December.

April 2015: The Month in Email

We started the month with some conversations about best practices, both generally looking at the sort of best practices people follow (or don’t) as well as some specific practices we wanted to look at in more depth. Three for this month: