Recent Posts

World IPv6 launch day

laura
Jun 6, 2012

Industry

Today is world IPv6 launch day. A group of ISPs, network hardware manufacturers and web companies permanently enabled IPv6 for their products and services.
What’s this got to do with email? According to a post on the NANOG mailing list the very first email to arrive at the Comcast IPv6 mailserver was received a minute after the server was turned on. This email was spam and was caught by Cloudmark’s filters.
Comcast goes on to assure readers that more mail came in and not all of it was spam.
But, yes, the first email sent to Comcast over IPv6 was spam. Welcome to the future.

Things people hate about your email marketing

laura
Jun 6, 2012

Asides , Industry

I found this article over on Hubspot, and I think it covers a lot of why people hate email marketing quite well.

Spamtraps are not the problem

laura
Jun 5, 2012

Industry

Often clients come to me looking for help “removing spamtraps from their list.” They approach me because they’ve found my blog posts, or because they’ve been recommended by their ISP or ESP or because they found my name on Spamhaus’ website. Generally, their first question is: can you tell us the spamtrap addresses on our lists so we can remove them?
My answer is always the same. I cannot provide a list of spamtrap addresses or tell you what addresses to remove. Instead what I do is help clients work through their email address lists to identify addresses that do not and will not respond to offers. I also will help them identify how those bad addresses were added to the list in the first place.
Spamtraps on a list are not the problem, they’re simply a symptom of the underlying data hygiene problems. Spamtraps are a sign that somehow addresses are getting onto a list without the permission of the address owner. Removing the spamtrap addresses without addressing the underlying flaws in data handling may mean resolving immediate delivery issues, but won’t prevent future problems.
Improving data hygiene, particularly for senders who are having blocking problems due to spam traps, fixes a lot of the delivery issues. Sure, cleaning out the traps removes the immediate blocking issue, but it does nothing to address any other addresses on the list that were added without permission. In fact, many of my clients have discovered an overall improvement in delivery after addressing the underlying issues resulting in spamtraps on their lists.
Focusing on removing spamtraps, rather than looking at improving the overall integrity of data, misses the signal that spamtraps are sending.

Congrats!

laura
May 31, 2012

Asides , Industry

Congratulations go out to Matt Blumberg for being named one of the top entrepreneurs for 2012 by Crain’s New York Business!

AOL update

laura
May 31, 2012

Asides

A reader has been talking with AOL about the mtain* responses that people were receiving. AOL has said both responses mentioning mtain-*.r1000.mx.aol.com are actually DNY:T1 bounces that are being presented incorrectly. Both responses should be treated the same as 421 DYN:T1.

Permission.

laura
May 30, 2012

Industry

The discussion of “permission” and “opt-in” is one that keeps popping up again and again. I am working on posting some more thoughts about permission and consent. While I’m still thinking about what new I can say, here is a list of articles Word to the Wise I’ve posted in the past on permission:

AOL … again

laura
May 25, 2012

Asides

A number of senders are reporting that they’re getting unusual responses from AOL servers. The responses include:

Another reason not to use no-reply@

laura
May 25, 2012

Industry

A story from someone handling support at a UK company that regularly sends out transactional email with no-reply@company in the From: line.

The challenge of integrated marketing

laura
May 24, 2012

Industry

There are dozens of ways for companies to interact with customers these days. Business Insider recently posted this infographic, only to realize that they’d left off Pintrest.