October 2017: The Month in Email

October was a busy month. In addition to on boarding multiple new clients, we got new desks, I went to Toronto to see M3AAWG colleagues for a few days, and had oral surgery. Happily, we’re finally getting closer to having the full office setup. 

What is an office without a Grover Cat? (he was so pleased he figured out how to get onto it at standing height).

All of this means that blogging was pretty light this month.
One of the most interesting bits of news this month is that the US National Cybersecurity Assessments & Technical Services Team issued a mandate on web and email security, which Steve reviewed here.
In best practices, I made a brief mention about the importance of using subdomains rather than entirely new domain names in links and emails and even DKIM keys.
We’ve talked about engagement-based filters before, but it’s interesting to note how they’re being used in business environments as well as consumer environments.
We also put together a survey looking at how people use Google Postmaster Tools. The survey is now closed, and I’ll be doing a full analysis over the next couple of weeks, as well as talking about next steps. I did a quick preview of some of the highlights earlier this week.
Finally, a lot of industry news this month: Most notably, Mailchimp has changed its default signup process from double opt-in to single opt-in. This caused quite a bit of sturm und drang from all ends of the industry. And, in fact, a few days later they announced the default double-opt-in would stay in place for .eu senders. I didn’t get a chance to blog about that as it happened. In other news, the Road Runner FBL is permanently shuttered, and Edison Software has acquired Return Path’s Consumer Insight division. Also worth noting: Microsoft is rolling out new mail servers, and you’ll likely see some new — and potentially confusing — error codes.
My October themed photo is behind a cut, for those of you who have problems with spiders.

We also went camping with friends mid-month and had a tarantula wander through the campsite Sunday morning.
We also saw a bald eagle circling over our campsite, but I didn’t have my phone, or camera out so I didn’t get a picture. Likewise, I missed a shot of the fox crossing the road on our way out.

The Blighty Flag
Proofpoint acquires Cloudmark

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February 2016: The Month in Email

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Feb2016forBlogIt was a busy few weeks for us with the M3AAWG meeting in San Francisco. We saw lots of old friends and met many new people — all in all, a success, despite the M3AAWG plague we both contracted. Hot topics at the conference included DMARC, of course, and I took the opportunity to write up a guide to help you determine if you should publish a DMARC policy.
On the subject of advice and guidance, Ask Laura continues to be a popular column — we’ve had lots of interesting questions, and are always looking for more general questions about email delivery. We can’t tackle specifics about your program in this column (get in touch if we can help you with that directly) but we can help with questions like “Will our ESP kick us off for mailing purchasers?” or “Help! I’m confused about authentication.”
Continuing on the authentication front, I noted that Gmail is starting to roll out some UI to indicate authentication status to users. It will be interesting to see if that starts to affect user (or sender) behavior in any way. In other interesting industry news, Microsoft has implemented an Office 365 IP Delisting page. I also wrote a followup post to my 2015 overview of the state of ESPs and purchased lists — it’s worth checking out if this is something your business considers.
I wrote a post about security and backdoors, prompted by both the FBI/Apple controversy and by Kim Zetter’s talk at M3AAWG about Stuxnet. These questions about control and access will only get more complicated as we produce, consume, store, and share more data across more devices.
Speaking of predictions, I also noted my contribution to a great whitepaper from Litmus that explores the state of Email Marketing in 2020.
As always, we looked at some best practices this month. I wrote up some of my thoughts about data hygiene following Mailchimp’s blog post about the value of inactive subscribers. As always, there isn’t one right answer, but there’s a lot of good food for thought. And more food for thought: how best practices are a lot like public health recommendations. As with everything, it comes down to knowing your audience(s) and looking at the relationship(s), which, as you know, is a favorite subject around here.

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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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