Showing posts with the label rant

Bad Ideas: Why Giving Your Email List to a Third Party Is Just Dumb

A story recently broke on 404 Media that made deliverability experts everywhere cry a little inside: YouTube channel Channel 5 admitted to handing a CSV file of its email subscribers over to a third party so that person could market a new product to them. Putting aside the specific names and political figures involved (which are irrelevant to the underlying email mechanics) this incident se…
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I’m a DMARC fan. Are you?

Based on this totally scientific, absolutely guaranteed to be accurate poll that I ran on Linkedin for the past week or so, DMARC is almost universally loved. A couple of people got a bit snarky in the comments, pointing out the “social media effect” and that this was like ask…

No Reply, Not Your Domain? Yes, Problem

As reported by Ars Technica , security researcher Cory Solovewicz owns the domains noreply.net and noreply.us. Every day, he sees nearly 700 inbound email attempts to addresses on those domains. That is a massive amount of misdirected mail, and it's leaking personally ident…

The Context Box: Do It, But Right

Newsletter strategist Dylan Redekop recently wrote about the "context box, " his term for the line in a marketing or newsletter email explaining why you are receiving a particular message. (By the way, I think he coined something useful here, so I'm totally going …

Which ESP is Best for Deliverability? (Spoiler: Wrong Question)

Just the other day, I saw someone post another one of those "Deliverability Ranked by ESP" charts, and frankly, it drives me nuts. These charts are inaccurate and misleading. There is no useful way to generate a single "snapshot metric" that tells you you…

Bad ideas: From Sticky Widgets to the Spam Folder

Let’s say you run a business selling, oh, I dunno, widgets. Maybe sticky, flat widgets, printed on one side, where you peel off the back so buyers can slap them onto a laptop or a bumper. You’ve sold a lot of those widgets over the years, which means you’re sitting on a massive…

Is email broken right now?

January and February were not kind to many email senders and mailbox providers. Glitches were to be found and experienced. Google accidentally misclassified a bunch of emails at one point. Yahoo and Apple seemed to be accidentally rejecting non-spam messages for a time. And Mi…

Dear Jerkwad, or: Garbage in, garbage out

As mentioned in passing in this week's Masters in Marketing (which is a great email newsletter that you should subscribe to), I'm very wary of open field personalization. It's an example of "garbage in, garbage out." Maybe another name for it would be the…

Does Spamhaus matter today?

Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: Still yes, and here's why. Spamhaus. If you're in the business of sending email, you've probably heard the name. Maybe not as much lately. But that doesn't mean you can ignore them. Right now, email senders are heads-down trying…

When to Double Opt-in

I'm a strong advocate for double opt-in, a very specific email and permission verification process. The process works by, upon receiving an email address in a signup form, sending a confirmation email out to the address, and not considering the person a subscriber unless th…

Keep Calm and Solve the Problem

I'm currently serving as president of my building's condo association. It's not a huge building, just over a couple dozen units, but it's big enough that things can sometimes go sideways. Of late, I've been dealing with a situation that includes a possible s…

Always remember: spam is a state of mind

Just about weekly, somebody reaches out to me with something like this: Help! Our email marketing campaigns are going to the spam folder. I read your advice, so I've implemented SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and that didn't fix it! You told me that would fix it! What gives? Why …

Five email newsletter must-haves in 2025

This isn't a click-baity headline sneakily chosen to attract random SEO attention, I promise you. Instead, today I share five things that I have personally AND recently been frustrated by; failures in the execution of other peoples' email newsletters. Missing features a…

My love letter to Email

Thanks to Lauren Meyer of Socketlabs for suggesting that Valentine’s Day was a good time for folks to share why we love email so much. Want to see what other folks are sharing? Look for the #DearEmail hashtag on Linkedin . It should be clear to you by now that email is my fav…

There's No Blocklist Conspiracy

Every once in a while somebody drops into comments espousing a conspiracy theory around how blocklists are “designed to extract money from email senders” or some other crazy thing about how dare blocklists not block mail from Gmail given that they’re receiving unsolicited email…

IFAQ: Where I answer Infrequently Asked Questions about Cold Leads

I get asked periodically for tips and tricks, best practices for cold lead emails. The question came again just a few days ago. Thing is, I don't have anything like that, because cold lead emails just aren't a practice compatible with long term, solidly positive deliver…

Stop it: ESP deliverability rankings mean nothing

How many different ESP or marketing automation platforms have you used to send significant amounts of mail? I'm up to eight, more or less. I've logged into others, too, but these are the ones that I've used to send "significant" amounts of mail. They are: …