Liveblogging from MarketingSherpa

Just kidding; I didn't go. But I've seen that headline on about 18 different blogs today and decided to jump on the band wagon.

Help David Ritz

Please donate to David Ritz's legal defense fund.

Why? Read this. (My post also got picked up by CircleID and Slashdot.) Read this, too.

How? Go here. (It's managed by Ed Falk, whom I find trustworthy.)

It's good to help David, and that's a good reason to donate. But another good reason is if you're like me and you work in email or network security, you've done a lot of the things David was "accused" of -- "impersonating a mail server" by doing a telnet to port 25 to troubleshoot a mail server issue, performing DNS zone transfers, used the host command, etc. Uh, hi, these aren't illegal, regardless of what a judge may think. These are regular tools lawfully used thousands of times a day by thousands of internet professionals. Don't let this bad decision stand!

More on the Obvious

Good advice from my industry colleague Mickey Chandler. A couple of highlights:

• If people don’t ask for mail, they’ll report it as spam. It really is just that simple.
• Are you sending mail to this list that people expect? If they don’t, then it will get marked as spam.
• If enough people do that, you will get blocked.

Another Thing to Remember

Today's message is a short one: Just because they haven’t opted-out doesn’t mean they opted-in.

Dear Direct Magazine

Today I got an email from Direct Magazine. Subject line: "Wake up! It's time to combat subscriber fatigue." It looks very similar to the email I got from Direct Magazine six days ago, with the exact same subject line.

Both of these emails went to my spam folder in Gmail. Why? Because Direct Magazine has yet to practice what they preach -- as I related previously, signing up for emails from Direct resulted in a bunch of extra emails that I didn't expect and had trouble figuring out how to unsubscribe from. Until Gmail took care of me, and started putting their messages in the spam folder.

Oh, the irony. Allow me to address it in an open letter to Direct:

Dear Direct Magazine,

I am a fatigued subscriber. I'm not opening these emails or loading images. I'm not clicking on links. I'm not moving your email messages out of the spam folder. It seems as though I am not alone in this regard.

Maybe it's time for you to combat subscriber fatigue to fix your sending reputation.

Regards,
Al
PS- Why did you send me the exact same email twice, six days apart?