Recent Posts

Thoughts on transactional mail

I mentioned a few weeks ago about a conversation I’d had at MAAWG about transactional email and opened up the conversation to readers here. Mike proposed a definition.

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Modifying RP managed FBLs

I was recently pointed out the FBL support pages for those feedback loops hosted by ReturnPath. Clicking around, they have the framework and the beginnings of a good source of information for their services. You can also open support tickets for questions and services that are not covered in their knowledge base.

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Bad subject lines

I tend not to blog too much on subject lines as they are really a marketing issue and a subscriber relationship issue. The subject lines a particular mailer uses should be directed and developed with an eye towards making the mail relevant and useful to the recipient.
What subject lines shouldn’t be is deceptive, either intentionally or inadvertantly. How can a subject line be inadvertantly deceptive? Take this: “Today only! One day sale!” The email in question was a printable coupon to get a discount at a bookstore. Unfortunately, the sales was not “Today” – the day the email was received.
On the one hand, I can sympathize with the sender. Sometimes email takes a while to get delivered, particularly for large mail drops. So you want to send before the mail needs to be in the inbox and in front of the recipient. But, that means that some of your recipients may get the email before “Today.” A much better subject line would have been “Friday only! One day sale!”

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Problems at Excite

I’ve been chasing an intermittent and inconsistent delivery problem at Excite for a week or so. Excite is accepting email, but mail is not getting to the recipient’s inbox or bulk folder. Al tweeted he’s seeing a similar problem with his customers’ mail and had contacted Excite.
Excite does appear to be aware of the issue, but I have no ETA on a fix.
EDIT: Comments are closed

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Update on FixOutlook.org campaign

Last week I mentioned that the Email Standards Project has started a website (FixOutlook.org) and a twitter campaign to pressure Microsoft to use a HTML compliant rendering engine for Outlook. Currently Outlook uses the HTML engine in MS Word and that engine is not fully compliant with of the HTML standards as published by W3C.org.
Microsoft did reply to the FixOutlook.org campaign on the MSDN Developer blog. The money quote, which they bolded for emphasis in the original post:

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Problems with Barracuda blocklist

Mickey documents a problem he encountered with the Barracuda blocklist and relisting happening after a delisting even when there was no mail being sent through the IP in question. I’ve not had much interaction with Barracuda or their blocklist so I don’t have many suggestions. If you have useful information, head over there and comment.

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Traveling again!

I’m headed off early tomorrow morning to help celebrate a friend’s wedding (Hi Al!). I’ll be back at work on Tuesday and blogging will be back on schedule.

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Email standards and formatting

There is a lot of buzz on twitter and the email blogs today about Microsoft’s decision to use the HTML rendering engine from MS Word in Outlook 2010 instead of the HTML rendering engine from Explorer. The people behind the Email Standards Project have set up FixOutlook.org and are asking people to join twitter to and tweet the fixoutlook.org URL to send a message to Microsoft.
I’ve been thinking about this much of the morning, and considering Microsoft’s history with implementation of standards. Microsoft has never really followed many of the Internet standards. They adopt what they like, and create new “standards” that work with MS products. This has worked for them, given their position in the market. Companies and software developers that wanted to interoperate with Microsoft software had to comply with Microsoft, Microsoft never had to comply with them.
I find it extremely unlikely that this effort will cause Microsoft to deviate from their course. Based on Microsoft’s history, the solution is not for Microsoft to change rendering in Outlook, but for everyone else to change how they do things.
Mark Brownlow blogged on the topic, too, and makes another of his insightful points. Email marketers and email designers are not an important user group to Microsoft. Instead, they’re focused on the actual people who use Outlook to send and receive email.

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Guilty of violating CAN SPAM

Al Ralsky has long been known as “the king of spam.” He has a long history of spamming, suing ISPs who block his mail and refusing to provide him with connectivity. He was profiled in the Detroit Free Press based on his spamming activity more than 5 years ago. He also has a history of convictions for fraud and other related crimes.
Yesterday, he and some of his family and business partners pled guilty to another raft of charges including fraud, money laundering and CAN SPAM violations. This may be the first time someone has pled guilty to violating CAN SPAM. Press reports indicate there is jail time in his future.
Detroit Free Press article
Washinton Post article
DirectMag article
This is the type of mailer that all mailers compete with. Everyone had to deal with spam from Al Ralsky: recipients, senders and ISPs. Thanks to the justice department, FBI and everyone involved for their hard work.

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What a world!

One of the fascinating things on the Internet is how a few dedicated people can create free, or mostly free, resources that become an important part of infrastructure for companies around the world. Blocklists are one of the prime examples of this phenomenon. Almost all of the widely used blocklists started out as a resource provided by a single person, generally using recovered hardware on donated bandwidth. There is a consistent time commitment, but no more than any other hobby.
As the list gains in popularity, the resource commitment increases. Hardware purchases and upgrades need to be made, bandwidth bills increase, more and more time must be spent dealing both with people using the list and people affected by listings. Truly popular lists may have to invest in ticketing systems and diagnostic infrastructure. Websites need to be maintained. The list may now be part of the infrastructure at far flung corporations or ISPs. People affected by the listings may be demanding immediate responses. The hobby is now the equivalent a job and people who aren’t paying the maintainer rely on that “hobby” for their own networks.
Once a list is successful, then maintainer needs to expand infrastructure, build up redundancy and have defenses against various attacks. This is the point where they start talking to volunteers to manage some of the extra work. Typically they find individuals or corporations willing to donate bandwidth and rack space.
Successful lists rely on volunteers or paid staff to handle listings and delistings as well as the databases, websites and DNS servers required to host a public service. None of this is unusual, many of the people maintaining lists are strong proponents of the open source software and use that to model the blocklist services as well. However, it’s always a good thing to remember that some of the people maintaining blocklists are doing this not for any personal profit, but as a way to contribute to the community on the Internet.
One thing I didn’t mention above, but deserves to be recognized is that the maintainer needs to be someone with people skills and the ability to handle conflict. This is true for internal conflict, among the volunteers or the service providers as well as external conflict with people affected by the blocklist. There is a lot of conflict around blocklists and it’s critically important that the maintainer, or their designated representative, be able to handle angry people in emotionally charged situations.
Why did this come up today? One of the top blocklists, SORBS announced over the weekend (at least here on the west coast of the US) that without someone stepping up to donate bandwidth and space that SORBS would be shut down in July. Other bloggers have commented on this. In case anyone was unclear on the commitment it takes to maintain a space, Michelle mentions on her shutdown post SORBS needs a full 42U of rack space for the hardware and has commented on spam-l that bandwidth costs are estimated by her current host to be 200K a month.
Given the time and resource constraints it is unlikely that SORBS users will see uninterrupted service. It is possible that the data will be moved and hosted elsewhere, however, current SORBS users may want to stop querying the lists now and wait for a resolution to be announced.

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