Tag Archives: WordToTheWise

I’ve seen reports that someone is asserting that utm=COVID19 in URLs results in all mail going to bulk at multiple ISPs. This is the type of thing that someone says is true and dozens of folks believe it and thus a “deliverability phact” is born. For a plethora of reasons, this doesn’t pass the sniff test. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. It’s…

More than 30 people joined our delivery discussion from last Wednesday evening (Irish time). Thanks to all who joined and participated. I had a number of different topic suggestions, but the thing on everyone’s mind was the current pandemic and how much email many of our customers, clients, and companies are sending. We had what I think was a productive discussion sharing information and experiences.…

Lots of folks are socialising distantly these days, so I thought I’d try a scheduled deliverability discussion over video. Given the time difference, I’ll log on in the evening Irish time which makes this daytime for most of the US folks. The first call will be Wednesday, March 25, 2020 at 5pm Ireland time. That’s 1pm Eastern and 10am Pacific. If you’re interested in joining,…

Things are very unsettled right now. Completely and totally unsettled. Even for those of us who are well geared up for and used to working from home are struggling in our current situation. We went for a walk down the canal on Tuesday, and it was very quiet, with almost no traffic on the street. There were various couples and families walking, but most were…

It’s a near silent St. Paddy’s day here in Ireland. We took a walk along the canal and took in the silence. On the way back, our neighbour’s kids had decorated their front window and I had to take a picture. Things are weird. Be kind to yourself and to others. Wash your hands. Don’t touch your face. Don’t send that email to your entire…

Gartner has some really good recommendations for companies considering mailing about the coronavirus pandemic. Launch your COVID-19-themed marketing email campaign only if you can answer yes to four questions: Am I telling customers something different from other brands versus saying the same thing as everyone else? Am I telling customers something they don’t already expect of my company or brand? Is the WIIFM (what’s in…

This is a followup from a post a few weeks ago about authentication changes at Office365. We have some more clarity on what is going on there. This is all best information we have right now. Microsoft is now requiring authentication to match the visible from address in order to reach the inbox at Office365. That means, either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain…

Recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Jillian Bowen and talking about deliverability for her podcast. #44 Busting the myths about email deliverability with Laura Atkins

Back at the office after traveling to visit a bunch of our US friends recently. A lot of news, both in and out of the email space, happened while we were gone. The biggest stories are outside the email space and I will admit to following the coronavirus news probably closer than I should. (My graduate work was done across the hall from one of…

It’s been a light blogging month. We’ve been dancing around getting the final plans, financing, and contractors set up for the work we’re doing on the Dublin house and then heading off for our first actual vacation in almost 5 years. But, I wrote half of this answering a question on mailop, so I may as well polish and publish. What is FCrDNS FCrDNS stands…

According to the UK DMA, marketers report improvements in deliverability after GDPR went into effect. I mean, thank you UK DMA for doing the research. Of course deliverability is going to improve when you send mail to those people who have expressly opted into your mail. 76% report an increase in open rates in the past 12 months; 75% say click- throughs are higher; 51%…

Would you trust an address verification company that used twitter spam to advertise their product? Would you trust an address verification company that sent email spam to advertise their product? Would you trust an address verification company that sent email advertising their product to made up addresses? Would you trust an address verification company that sent email advertising their product to spamtraps? Would you trust…

In 2020: 250OK says open rates were much lower than ESPs report. The Only Influencers list hosts a discussion about the value and use of open rates. A potential client contacts me asking if I can get their open rates to a certain percentage.A client shows me evidence of 100% inboxing but wants to improve their open rate.An industry group runs sessions at multiple meetings…

In the 1970s, while the early drafts of the Internet were being developed, a competing model for networking was being put together by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization). The OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) Model broke the work needed to implement a distributed network service into seven separate layers of abstraction, from the physical infrastructure at layer one all the way up to the application…

Right at the end of January, Microsoft appears to have made couple of changes to how they’re handling authentication. The interesting piece of this is that, in both cases, Microsoft is taking authentication protocols and using them in ways that are slightly outside the spec, but are logical extensions of the spec. The first is an extension of DMARC. They’re rolling out inbox flags for…

It’s that time of year again where nearly all my client calls involve the question, “are you going to be at M3AAWG SF?” Up until last year, the answer was always yes. But now it’s not a brief drive up the peninsula and a BART ride into the city, it’s a transatlantic plane flight. The clients I was talking with today said this was their…

Podia has scraped the Word to the Wise blog and I’m currently receiving an ongoing drip campaign from them absolutely begging me to mention them in my blog post on cold emails. I get maybe a dozen of this style of email a week. It’s pretty annoying but whatever. I delete them, blog about them or, very occasionally, share them with some folks who might…

Yesterday I learned that some ESPs don’t support the reply to: address. I asked around to discover which ESPs did. Here’s what I learned. ESPs that support reply-to: ActiveCampaignAmazonSESConstantContactCampaign MonitorCordialDelivraDoListEloquaEmmaEpsilonGetResponseHubSpotiContactListrakMailkitMailUpMarketoN6PardotwordResponsysSailthruSFMCSharpspringTwilio / SendGridZeta Global Thanks to all the colleagues who answered my question.

As I continue to think about how people troubleshoot email delivery I keep finding other things to talk about. Today we’re going to talk about the question most folks start with when troubleshooting delivery. “Did ISP change something?” At least once a week I check some delivery or email fora and some form of the question is sitting there. “Did X change something? We haven’t…

There are a lot of folks in the email industry that take issue with my stance that DMARC is not a viable solution to phishing. DMARC, at it’s absolute best, addresses one tiny, TINY piece of phishing. Look at this message I received today. My mail client presents this as from Quickbooks and hides the actual from email address from me. Most mail clients do…