When web experts opine about email…
30 May 2009
you get incredibly dumb statements like this one: Like promotional e-mail, transactional e-mail by nature bypasses search engines. Maria Krueger, Transactional e-mail can help market your brand, Post-Crescent (2009), http://www.postcrescent.com/article/20090518/APC0701/905180463/1436/APC03/Maria+Krueger+column++Transactional+e-mail+can+help+market+your+brand (last visited May 18, 2009). Uh? What? My car also by nature bypasses search engines (although it does, in fact, have an engine of its own,
Email is about relationships
8 March 2009
Did you know that it’s entirely possible to learn the wrong lessons? Well, it is. I use Zemanta to suggest possible links for blog posts. While writing yesterday’s blog post, a suggested link emerged dealing with CAN-SPAM and the definition of “spam.” That post by Roger Bauer shows how some people just don’t get it
Video in email
13 January 2009
I am asked about embedding Flash or Windows Media files in email on a fairly regular basis. I always advise against it. It never seems to deliver well and it also suffers from degradation in service. That is to say that it doesn’t seem to get where you want it as often, and when it
Bad Advice
20 October 2008
The hallmark of bad advice is the “there are very clear guidelines” statement which appears without an actual reference to the “very clear guideline”. A great example of this is an Email Insider article entitled: “Transactional Email:” CAN-SPAM. There are very clear guidelines on how much marketing content is acceptable in a transactional email (no
Prior Business Relationships are irrelevant
7 October 2008
When people don’t want to get permission to send mail, they usually don’t want to do other things as well. For instance, they don’t want to offer a way to unsubscribe. They want to make it easy to start and hard to stop. Unfortunately, CAN-SPAM decrees it should be easy to stop mail. And so
Sending email to wireless domains?
25 September 2008
One question that I get asked a lot has to do with sending email to wireless domains. So, I’ll lay out the answer here for all the world to see: No unsolicited messages may be sent to a recipient on a mobile domain for any reason, period. Here’s the general rule from the FCC’s Order
The Spock Trap
8 April 2008
I’ll admit it, I’m a policy wonk. I have a bachelor’s degree in Government. And, I read the Dipnote, the US State Department’s blog. It’s in my non-work blog feeds in Thunderbird. So, sue me. Today, John Matel writes a post titled: “Hidden Prosperity and the Banana Index in Iraq.” John Matel, Hidden Prosperity and
It’s hard being in court so much
1 November 2007
If you’re the owner(s) of Usenet.com, you must really feel in a pickle. One the one hand, you might feel really good. This month, Sierra Corporate Design, Inc., managed to take to trial a lawsuit against David Ritz alleging that the use of DNS is illegal in the state of North Dakota. It’s been a