Filters are stupid
Sometimes it bears remembering that many content filters aren’t score-based, but rather string-based. Because of this, you may have to more carefully craft your messages to deal with the fact that the filter cannot take context into account. And so, today I wish to share with you three different strings actually seen to have caused
Guest Blog: Consumers Cautiously Optimistic about the Future
Today, we have a guest blog from the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE). CAUCE has been heavily involved in crafting a worthy anti-spam law in Canada, so I reached out to them to see if they would like to guest blog here. Neil Schwartzman, CAUCE’s Executive Director, wrote back with the following: Neil Schwartzman
Pottery warriors are standing by…
…but they’re impotent and broken. On Saturday, I took the kids to the Houston Museum of Natural History to see its exhibit of the famous Chinese Terracotta Army. One of the things that I keep stressing to my kids as we have started homeschooling them is that history is all about the stories, not the
Something that authentication can’t help
The email said, “Our last mailing had 30 complaints at AOL. Will signing with DKIM and SPF help with our reputation there?” In some ways, that is a fair question. We do talk about reputation a lot and how authentication ties into that. But, really, this is something that authentication can’t help because, for all
Listen to your unsubscribers
When was the last time that you took a good, long listen to the people who are asking you to stop sending them email? If your ESP doesn’t provide an opportunity for your unhappy subscribers, you should ask them to create one. Your now-former subscribers have a story to tell that can help you retain
List Rental Is…
Peter Roebuck of AllWEBeMail (a division of All Web Promotion, Inc.) recently left a comment on Laura Atkins’ blog: rented email addresses, if done properly, should be no different from renting physical mailing addresses. With over 25 years in direct mail catalog experience, we know that catalogers are sending fewer catalogs and moving from print
Confirm to unsubscribe?
A question comes in this morning: Requiring the confirmation of an email address in an unsubscription is not CAN-SPAM compliant, right? While I’m not a lawyer, to my understanding that is absolutely correct. The current implementing rules for CAN-SPAM state: Neither a sender nor any person acting on behalf of a sender may require that
The Email Marketer’s Syllogism
I get to see a number of things on a daily basis which indicate that people may not have the best ideas when it comes to understanding how engaged their subscribers are. One such example reads: There are tens of thousands of people in our database with whom we communicate and who clearly want to
IP relisted despite no more mail being sent
On June 6, 2009, a client sent a mailing. After it was sent, their (static, only-used-by-them) IP was listed by a particular list that is generated by the creator of a large, well-known anti-spam appliance and seems to be used by default in that appliance. I didn’t notice the issue until I started checking all
SORBS Closure Imminent
SORBS wasn’t best DNSBL in the world. For instance, they listed all of one ESP’s net space because the maintainer had personal issues with the contact point at the ESP. As I recall, on their explanation of those blocks, they said that they were listing the space and that the contact point “is not an