Recent Posts

Bad marketing automation, part deux

laura
Jan 14, 2020

Industry

Back in April I wrote about some poor marketing automation that ended up spamming me with ‘cart abandonment’ emails when the issue was the company’s credit card processing went down. That post has now been scraped by the spammers Moosend and they keep sending me… poorly targeted automated spam.

Testing and data driven decisions

laura
Jan 13, 2020

Industry

There’s a lot of my education in the sciences that focused on how to get a statistically accurate sample. There’s a lot of math involved to pick the right sample size. Then there’s an equal amount of math involved to figure out the right statistical tests to analyse the data. One of the lessons of grad school was: the university has statistics experts, use them when designing studies.

Troubleshooting: the questions

laura
Jan 10, 2020

Faq

In my post earlier this week, katie asks:

what do you do next when the problem statement is as non-specific as “open rates are falling”? how would you go about getting from there to that next level of marketing email from our ESP goes to bulk?

Cost of authentication

laura
Jan 8, 2020

Faq

At the end of last year, Steve wrote a post about the different types of authentication. I thought I’d build on that and write about the costs associated with each type. While I know a lot of my readers are actually on the sending side, I’m also going to talk about the costs associated with the receiving side and a little bit about the costs for intermediaries such as CRM systems or ESPs.

Troubleshooting delivery problems

laura
Jan 7, 2020

Industry

Everyone has their own way of troubleshooting problems. I thought I would list out the steps I take when I’m trying to troubleshoot them.

Happy New Year

laura
Jan 6, 2020

Industry

Well, it’s 2020. The start of a new year and a new decade, or not depending on what number theory you use to count decades. Personally, I think we, as pattern loving humans, just happen to love numbers that end with 0 and we’re going to consider it special whether or not it’s the actual end or start of a decade.

Authentication

steve
Dec 30, 2019

Industry , Technical

Some notes on some of the different protocols used for authentication and authentication-adjacent things in email. Some of this is oral history, and some of it may be contradicted by later or more public historical revision.

Google IP reputation bad

laura
Dec 12, 2019

Industry

This morning hundreds of delivery folks logged into their Google Postmaster Tools account to see their IP reputation was bad.

It’s not marketing… it’s harassment

laura
Dec 9, 2019

Industry

Many years ago, we bought a VMWare license to manage the various virtual machines running our business infrastructure. As part of our move to Dublin, we decommissioned our cabinet and moved all of services into various bits of the cloud. This meant that when our VMWare support contract came up for renewal we declined the renewal.