Recent Posts

40 email companies

Ken Magill has a post up mentioning the top 40 companies in email marketing. Some highlights:

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ISP Postmaster sites

A number of ISPs have email information and postmaster sites available. I found myself compiling a list of them for a client today and thought that I would put up a list here.

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How to improve AOL delivery

DMNews interviewed Charles before he left AOL about the state of spam and the challenges for ISPs and how that affects senders. The article was published this week. In it he talks about

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Spam in the workplace

In comments on my last post Lux says:

It seems to me that in regard to PR people sending press releases to a professional journalist, you’ve got a very specific use case with slightly different rules of engagement from the norm.

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Wired editor has enough spam!

Seth Godin links to a post up over on The Long Tail about spammers who send PR mail to Chris Anderson, an editor at wired. Apparently lots of people send automated email to the editor of Wired hawking their latest and greatest product, service or photos.
In response to this overwhelming amount of mail, Chris has instituted a new email acceptance policy. He says

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New VP at Goodmail

Charles Stiles, who managed the postmaster team at AOL and was laid off 2 weeks ago, is the new VP of Worldwide Business Development at Goodmail.
Ken Magill mentioned the possibility of Charles moving to Goodmail yesterday.

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Do open rates matter?

Ken Magill over at DirectMag has an article deriding the reliance on ‘open rates’ as a metric for the success (or failure!) of marketing campaigns.

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DKIM "i=" vs "d=" and Reputation

This really should be part seven of a twelve part series or some such as it deals with an aspect of DKIM that’s really important, but is way down in the details of implementation. (dkim.org is a reasonable place to start for a general overview of DKIM).
There’s an apparently endless thread on the DKIM-SSP spec development mailing list at the moment about the differences between two fields in a DKIM signature that could be used to tie a senders reputation to. Several ESP delivery folks asked me to explain what everyone was talking about, and this post is a first cut at that.
“i=” vs “d=”
There are two possible fields in a DKIM signature that could be used to identify the sender of a message, and so to tie a sender history and reputation record to. They are the so-called “i=” and “d=” field, from the syntax used to include them in the signature.

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Experience as a recipient

One of the challenges of my job is to separate my personal feelings and experiences related to email marketing and spam from my advice to clients. I am here to make your delivery better, not to make everyone use email marketing the way that makes me the most comfortable.
That being said, I get a lot of spam across my various email addresses. If I have an extra few minutes I’ll sometimes send complaints, but more and more it is too hard, too complicated and / or the ISPs do not care anyway. In the last 2 weeks I’ve had 3 experiences with unexpected / unwanted email (aka: spam) where I did take action.

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Changes at AOL Postmaster desk

The recent layoffs at AOL did affect the AOL Postmaster desk, and information I have received is that there was significant loss. As a result of the staff decrease, some changes have been made to the whitelisting and FBL processes. In order for a FBL to be approved it must meet the new FBL guidelines. In a nutshell, anyone wanting to get a FBL from AOL must meet ONE of the following criteria.

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