Recent Posts

Top Commented Blog Posts on WttW in 2014

Here are the top 6 most commented on blog topics our Industry News & Analysis blog.

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Merry Christmas


A retro merry christmas from everyone at Word to the Wise!

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M3AAWG Recommends TLS

SSL or Secure Sockets Layer is protocol designed to provide a secure way of transmitting information between computer systems. Originally created by Netscape and released publicly as SSLv2 in 1995 and updated to SSLv3 in 1996. TLS or Transport Layer Security was created in 1999 as a replacement for SSLv3. TLS and SSL are most commonly used to create a secure (encrypted) connection between your web browser and websites so that you can transmit sensitive information like login credentials, passwords, and credit card numbers.
M3AAWG published a initial recommendation that urges the disabling of all versions of SSL. It has been a rough year for encryption security, first with Heartbleed vulnerability with the OpenSSL library, and again with POODLE which stands for “Padding Oracle on Downgraded Legacy Encryption” that was discovered by Google security researchers in October of 2014. On December 8, 2014 it was reported that TLS implementations are also vulnerable to POODLE attack, however unlike SSLv3, TLS can be patched where as SSL 3.0 has a fundamental issue with the protocol.

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Barracuda Email Security Service disruption

Starting around 10:15 2:45 EDT this morning, the Barracuda Email Security Service is having a issues processing email for customers.
More information on Twitter and reddit

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Brief DBL false positive

Google's Inbox Team answers questions on Reddit

The team behind Google’s new Inbox app did an “Ask us Anything” Q&A with reddit on December 3rd. The team consisted of a Product Manager, Designer, and Software Engineer and for two hours the team answered all sorts of questions.
Most of the questions were about new features or supporting additional email providers and it showed just how new this app is, it’s not quite ready to be your primary email client as Inbox only supports personal Gmail accounts. The Inbox team mentions they are working on supporting additional mail providers but does not give a timeline of when that would be available.
For email marketers, Google Inbox shares the same HTML sanitizer and media queries that Gmail does and when asked about email filtering it was mentioned that the direct marketing community would benefit by having a place for their emails within the Promos tab. They describe the Promo tab as

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Our new team members

This has been a busy year here at Word to the Wise. We started out launching our new website in Q1 and have been busily growing our client base. In order to meet the increased demand for our expertise, we’ve brought in new team members.
Meri has been working with us for a few months, helping me with client research and generally keeping my schedule under control. She was previously in ops at some large ISPs.
Josh started last week; he comes to us with a strong technical background and experience building teams. He was previously at Mansell Group (now Whatcounts). Josh will be working on client projects and helping us build out our team. Josh will also be contributing to the blog, look for his first post later this week.
We’re so excited to have both Meri and Josh at WttW. This is a big, exciting step forward in our company and we’re so glad they’ve decided to join us.

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Delays at Comcast

I’m seeing a significant amount of chatter on various lists that queues to Comcast are backing up right now. Looks to be something on their end.
Error messages are 421 “Try again later.” I’ll see if I can find someone at Comcast to give me some info.

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Lorem Ipsum for PII

When you’re developing code to handle data it’s almost essential to have a decent sized set of test data, so you can build a test harness to check on functionality and performance as you go.
A common way of doing that is to take a snapshot of your production database and pull out an appropriate subset from there. That works pretty well in most cases, but it’s a really bad idea if the data you’re working with is personally identifiable information, such as email addresses, phone numbers, credit cards and so on.
Test data gets spread everywhere. It’s checked in to source control systems, copied to developers laptops, included in publicly visible bug reports, shared with mailing lists when asking questions and sent to that dodgy overseas outsourcing company your CTO is evaluating. And if the code you’re developing sends email or SMS messages then sooner or later you’re going to misconfigure your test platform and send test messages to the contacts in your test data. (I’ve only done that once, and it was a memorable experience.)
But test data needs to be similar to real data, and look plausible, or it’s hard for manual testers to identify problems using it.
Enter randomuser.me – a simple API for generating random user data – name, email address, birthdate, phone numbers, postal address, social security number, even photos.
Need something more configurable, that lets you create a fake API to test your code against? Try RandomAPI for a web API returning JSON, SQL, CSV or YAML.
Just need some test JSON files you can generate and paste in to your test suite? Try JSON Generator.
Need bulk data, to load into your test database? Look at Mockaroo, DummyData or GenerateData.
Just don’t use your production PII, even if you plan on anonymizing it before use. Really.

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Spam is about invading other people's space

At the recent Sendgrid Emailmatter’s conference Sally Lehman advised attendees to “Treat someone’s inbox like it was their home.” This is advice I’ve been giving clients for a long time. I think it’s even more relevant now as so many people have data enabled phones and are checking email so frequently. It’s not just their home, it’s their personal space they can take with them.
Seanan McGuire, a friend and NY Times bestselling author, wrote a blog post today about how she views promotion and marketing as an artist and someone who is expected to promote her work. She also talks about what it feels like to be a target of promotion and offers some advice about how to promote your products online.  She talks about how she, as an author and creative type, is expected to do some level of self promotion and how that promotion is done in her space – whether that space be on twitter or her blog.

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