September 2017: The Month in Email

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.

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June 2015: the Month in Email

Happy July! We are back from another wonderful M3AAWG conference and enjoyed seeing many of you in Dublin. It’s always so great for us to connect with our friends, colleagues, and readers in person. I took a few notes on Michel van Eeten’s keynote on botnets, and congratulated our friend Rodney Joffe on winning the prestigious Mary Litynski Award.
In anti-spam news, June brought announcements of three ISP-initiated CAN-SPAM cases, as well as a significant fine leveled by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) against Porter Airlines. In other legal news, a UK case against Spamhaus has been settled, which continues the precedent we’ve observed that documenting a company’s practice of sending unsolicited email does not constitute libel.
In industry news, AOL started using Sender Score Certification, and Yahoo announced (and then implemented) a change to how they handle their Complaint Feedback Loop (CFL). Anyone have anything to report on how that’s working? We also noted that Google has discontinued the Google Apps for ISPs program, so we expect we might see some migration challenges along the way. I wrote a bit about some trends I’m seeing in how email programs are starting to use filtering technologies for email organization as well as fighting spam.
Steve, Josh and I all contributed some “best practices” posts this month on both technical issues and program management issues. Steve reminded us that what might seem like a universal celebration might not be a happy time for everyone, and marketers should consider more thoughtful strategies to respect that. I wrote a bit about privacy protection (and pointed to Al Iverson’s post on the topic), and Josh wrote about when senders should include a physical address, what PTR (or Reverse DNS) records are and how to use them, testing your opt-out process (do it regularly!), and advice on how to use images when many recipients view email with images blocked.

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February 2015 – The month in email

This was a short and busy month at WttW!

We attended another great M3AAWG conference, and had our usual share of interesting discussions, networking, and cocktails. I recapped our adventures here, and shared a photo of the people who keep your email safe while wearing kilts as well. We also commended Jayne Hitchcock on winning the Mary Litynski award for her work fighting abuse and cyberstalking.

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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:

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