Recent Posts

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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Do it yourself mail systems

Through my position here at Word to the Wise I’ve interacted with dozens of companies over the years. Some companies outsource the mechanics of email sending to email service providers, others buy a software or MTA solution from one of the many vendors out there. For both these groups delivery problems are usually issues with permission or user expectations. Technically there are few problems with sending, bounce handling, unsubscriptions and rate limiting. The commercial software, either as created by an ESP or a vendor, typically does these things well.
The last group, those who use a home built system, are a whole different story. They often do no bounce processing relying on the underlying mail transport agent (typically qmail) to do all that work. The problem is that a general mail transport agent handles bounces for a particular email send, but does not have any functionality to handle future emails to addresses that bounce. Consequently the list does not get bounce handled, dead addresses pile up and their delivery rates plummet.
A few weeks ago Derek talked about senders using homegrown email systems and the pitfalls therein. He has a good list of things companies should think of before deciding a home grown system is right for them.

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Slow Server

Sorry about the slowness, this server is the same one that is hosting thewholeinternet.wordtothewise.com and it got posted to digg today.
If the traffic storm keeps up for more than a day or two we’ll make other arrangements for the blog.

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Consent does not mean confusing your recipients

Cam Beck on Marketing Prefs has a post today about presenting users with confusing choices in an opt-in process.

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What metrics are you measuring?

Marketers measure a lot of metrics about the email they send. But are they measuring the right metrics?
Mark Brownlow talks about how marketers may not always know what their measuring. He also links to Email Insider where the Email Diva talks about what metrics can be measured. More importantly, she points out that asking questions and determining what you want out of your email marketing program is critical to determining what metrics you should measure. She says:

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ISPs like boxes of meat

On the heels of JDs post about building relationships with ISPs, many of our Abacus customers and our ISP contacts have been commenting that boxes of meat are always welcome.
Please, remember to send them boxes of meat.
Meat may not get your email delivered, but it will make the ISPs remember you fondly.

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