Recent Posts

Spamtraps are overblown… by senders

laura
Apr 25, 2019

Faq

One of the fascinating parts of my job is seeing how different groups in email have radically disparate points of view. A current example is how much value senders put on spamtraps compared to ISPs and filtering companies.

CAN-SPAM Again

steve
Apr 24, 2019

Legal

The US CAN-SPAM act is the primary US legislation covering commercial email. It’s been around since 2003, but I still see a steady stream of questions about it, and the folkloric answers to some of them are all over the place.

When marketing automation goes bad

laura
Apr 22, 2019

Industry

Friday I attempted to make a purchase online. I go through the selection and checkout process … up through the payment choices. When I pick pay by credit card I get an error message that says “credit card expiration date wrong.” All very strange because I’ve not put in a credit card number or expiration date.

Question of the day

laura
Apr 18, 2019

Uncategorized

Is 10,000 emails sent a few times a week a high enough volume to improve a Gmail reputation?

Gmail suddenly puts mail in the bulk folder

laura
Apr 16, 2019

Delivery Improvement

One of the delivery challenges that regularly comes up in various delivery discussion spaces is the “Gmail suddenly put my mail in spam.” From my perspective, there is rarely a “suddenly” about Gmail’s decision making process.

TLS and Gmail delivery

laura
Apr 11, 2019

Industry

I’m seeing some questions about TLS and Gmail. Folks are seeing a correlation between sending without TLS and the mail going to bulk.

Low bounce rates don’t mean a list is good

laura
Apr 9, 2019

Best Practices

Many people believe that if they remove non-existent addresses from their mailing lists that their lists will make it to the inbox without a problem. In fact, an entire industry has grown up around the idea that sending mail to valid addresses can never be spam. This isn’t true, of course, spammers use many of the same techniques legitimate mailers do to clean their lists.

Explicit consent

laura
Apr 8, 2019

Industry

I’m working on a blog post about correlation and causation and how cleaning a list doesn’t make it opt-in and permission isn’t actually as outdated as many think and is still important when it comes to delivery. Today is a hard-to-word day, so I headed over to twitter. Only to find someone in my personal network re-tweeted this:

Delivery is not dependent on authentication

laura
Apr 4, 2019

Best Practices

All too often folks come to me with delivery problems and lead off with all of the things they’ve done to send mail right. They assure me they’re using SPF and DKIM and DMARC and they can’t understand why things are bad. There is this pervasive belief that if you do all the technical things right then you will reach the inbox.