Recent Posts

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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The key to inbox delivery: make your email relevant.

Following on from previous posts here, here and here, JD Falk discusses ways to get your email into the inbox.

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Blacklisted on FiveTen: no big deal

Al posted an analysis on DNSBL Resource about the effectiveness of the FiveTen blacklist.
He says:

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Viral Marketing by email

Matt talks about a new marketing report from the ThinData Newsletter.
The Newsletter offers the following recommendations on using viral marketing as part of your next email campaign.

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Relevancy, yet again

Email Insider has another post discussing how important relevancy is to getting email delivered.

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Tools for monitoring email

A number of groups provide tools for monitoring email performance.
Some of these tools are provided by ISPs, like Hotmail and AOL have postmaster webpages. Hotmail also provides things like SNDS so you can monitor what Hotmail is seeing about your network.
Al has a new blacklist stats center over at DNSBL.com. Of interest is the accuracy of some of the widely used lists like Spamhaus, Spamcop, and PSBL. Other lists like FiveTen were wildly inaccurate. In fact, Al has shown that blocking mail from any IP with a 7 in it is more accurate (more spam hits, less non-spam hits) than FiveTen.
ReturnPath provides free reputation lookup and monitoring based on the data they acquire.

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