Recent Posts

Spamming to hide fraud

• laura
• Industry

An interesting article at NetworkWorld last month, describing spam bombs to victims of fraud and identity theft to hide the transactions and notifications from financial institutions.

The challenge of Gmail

• laura
• Industry

A lot of my sales inquiries recently are about getting good inbox delivery at Gmail. I’ve mentioned before, I can usually tell when an ISP changes things because they suddenly become the subject of a great many phone calls.
In this case, Gmail seems to have turned up their engagement filters and is sending a lot more mail to the bulk folder. I have also noticed other people are blogging about Gmail delivery problems. Al eventually determined that it was mailings sent from other IPs that were degrading the delivery of his customer’s emails.
Gmail, more than the other major ISPs, seems to not be weighting IP reputation very heavily these days. They’re looking at domain reputation and they’re using all mentions of a domain in that reputation. A lot of senders, some of them spammers, segregate their email streams (acquisition, marketing, transactional) across IP addresses in order to stop poorly performing mails from harming delivery of other emails they’re sending. But Gmail’s current filtering scheme seems designed to focus on domain reputation and minimize the impact of IP reputation.
This is making the Gmail inbox tough to reach for a lot of mailers these days. Even in cases where the mailer isn’t hiring affiliates or actively partitioning mail, if a domain is seen frequently in spam then delivery for that whole domain is hurting. Signing with DKIM and publishing a DMARC record may help. But the reality right now is that there doesn’t seem to be a silver bullet into the Gmail inbox.

DMARC makes it a year

• laura
• Industry

Yesterday DMARC.org announced that in a year DMARC protects over 60 million mailboxes worldwide.

They really think we're stupid

• laura
• Industry

More on CASL

• laura
• Legal

Three great articles on CASL.

• Does Canada’s Anti-Spam Law Really Make It Illegal To Email a Step-Parent or Great Uncle? No.
• Does Canada’s Anti-Spam Law Really Make It Illegal To Promote a Child’s Lemonade Stand? No.
• Does Canada’s Anti-Spam Law Really Stop Small Business From Using Email Marketing? No.

HT: Neil Schwartzman

Mini Cooper and their email oops

• laura
• Best practices

I haven’t been able to track down any information about what happened, but it seems MINI USA had a major oops in their email marketing recently. So much so that they’re sending out apologies by snail mail. Pictures of the apology package appeared on Reddit earlier this week, and include a chocolate rose, some duct tape and a SPAM can stress reliever.
It’s a great example of a win-back campaign that really focuses on the recipients rather than the sender.

8 things that make your mail look like spam

• laura
• Best practices

In the comments of last week’s Wednesday question John B. asked

New player in the DMARC space

• laura
• Asides , Industry

Over on the DMARC-Discuss list, Comcast announced they had turned on DMARC validation and companies that publish DMARC records should start receiving reports from Comcast.

A Spam Blast from the Past

• steve
• Industry

A couple of days ago an ex-employee of Opt-In Inc., was kind enough to do a Reddit AMA answering questions about their experience working with Steve Hardigree in the “legitimate” email marketing industry, back in the early 2000s.
The whole thing is worth a read, but I thought I’d share some of his more interesting answers here.
Everyone knows everyone

Address leak leads to phishing

• laura
• Industry

A number of people in the industry are reporting getting phishing emails to addresses they used at DocuSign.
There were initial reports of a DocuSign data breach back in December. Now it appears DocuSign is being used as a phishing target.