Email addiction survey

The great folks over at Zettasphere and Emailmonday have released their Email Addiction Survey. Nothing surprising in the data that I can see, although I suspect one particular data point is going to surprise folks.

Yup, more than 70% of people don’t really care about a do not reply address in a message. Honestly, I’m not surprised. Most users don’t really care. In all honesty it probably doesn’t affect delivery that much any longer, either. I still think it’s generally a bad idea but as long as you’re providing a communications channel for recipients to connect with your company it’s probably not going to be a giant problem.

 

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We joined the i2Coalition

Word to the Wise has joined the i2Coalition. Today they posted our introduction to their blog.
Why did we do it?
Email, and online spaces, are so important to modern life. We shop, bank, communicate, play and interact online. The internet has facilitated everything from political revolution to coffee dates and international friendships. Steve watched the Berlin Wall fall from his college dorm room over the internet. The internet was a major factor in the organization of the Arab Spring and other political movements. And sometimes we just meet people online. BBSes, usenet, email, and social networks let us connect with each other.
With that being said, too many people see online spaces as nebulous and “not real.” But the reality is that people genuinely connect, organize, and participate in online spaces. Those spaces need to be protected so these things can continue. The internet is, in many ways, a very special and unique place that has facilitated the growth of millions of communities. Unless we protect the infrastructure, these communities will fall apart and be useless.

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The history of email

My first access to “the internet” was through a dialup modem on a VAX at the FDA. I was a summer intern there through my college career and then worked full time after graduation and before grad school. My email address ended in .bitnet. I could mail some places but not others. One of the places I couldn’t send mail was to my friends back on campus.
A few of those friends were computer science majors, so one weekend they tried to help me troubleshoot things. . There were text files that they ended up searching through looking up how to send mail from .bitnet to .edu. But it was all a baffling experience. Why couldn’t it just work? I had email, they had email, why could we not talk?
I never did figure out how to send email to campus from .bitnet.
Eventually, the FDA moved from BITNET to the internet and I had a .gov address. I could send mail around just by getting the recipients’s address. But the mystery of why I could mail some .edus and not others still lingers. I wonder what our setup was that we couldn’t send mail. I’ll probably never know. I don’t even have enough details to explain the problem to someone who would know. I suspect the answer will be “bang paths” or “host.txt” files, but I really don’t know.

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The perfect email

More and more I’m moving away from consulting on technical setup issues as the solution to delivery problems. Delivery is not about the technical perfection of a message. Spammers get the technical right all the time. No, instead, delivery is about sending messages the user wants. While looking for something on the blog I found an old post from 2011 that’s still relevant today. In fact, I’d say it’s even more relevant today than it was when I wrote it 5 years ago.
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Email is a fluid and ever changing landscape of things to do and not do.
Over the years my clients have frequently asked me to look at their technical setup and make sure that how they send mail complies with best practices. Previously, this was a good way to improve delivery. Spamware was pretty sloppy and blocking for somewhat minor technical problems was a great way to block a lot of spam.
More recently filter maintainers have been able to look at more than simple technical issues. They can identify how a recipient interacts with the mail. They can look at broad patterns, including scanning the webpages an email links to.
In short, email filters are very sophisticated and really do measure “wanted” versus “unwanted” down to the individual subscriber levels.
I will happily do technology audits for clients. But getting the technology right isn’t sufficient to get good delivery. What you really need to consider is: am I sending email that the recipient wants? You can absolutely get away with sloppy technology and have great inbox delivery as long as you are actually sending mail your recipients want to receive.
The perfect email is no longer measured in how perfectly correct the technology is. The perfect email is now measured by how perfect it is for the recipient.

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