There will probably be light blogging here the next 2 weeks. Tomorrow I am off to a friend’s wedding down south and next Sunday I am off to the MAAWG meeting in Ft. Lauderdale for 4 days.
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It is, in fact, one year today that I started blogging. My first real post came on August 30, 2007… discussing the e360 v. Spamhaus case. And look, here I am, a year later still discussing the e360 v. Spamhaus case. The end of that first post said:
Overall I think the ruling is generally what we could have expected. I’m quite pleased that the court affirmed that Spamhaus may legally list senders that comply with CAN SPAM. I am also eager to see what happens during discovery for damages.
I think the answer is nothing happened other than e360 repeatedly and painfully shot themselves in the foot.
Thanks for reading for the past year. And even more thanks for some great comments and discussions. Have a good 3 day weekend.
Sorry for the downtime, the machine running the blog had a motherboard fail and for various reasons (deadlines, family emergencies, etc) it has taken a bit of time to get the blog moved to another machine.
I do apologize for the time the blog was gone. Regular blogging will return tomorrow.
As you can see we have updated the blog theme. This is a custom theme based on the WordPress K2 theme. The overall look is much lighter and fits in better with our main website.
As part of the change I have also re-categorized all the previous posts into 4 categories:
- Best Practices contains posts about best practices for delivery, both in terms of technology and in terms of policy. This is also where stories of bad practices are included as examples of what not to do.
- Delivery Improvement contains posts discussing how to improve delivery, including examples from my experiences with clients. Announcements about ISP changes are also in this category.
- Industry is commentary on posts from other delivery and marketing blogs, news articles and happenings in the industry.
- Legal has posts about email related civil cases, comments on laws affecting email delivery and comments on criminal prosecutions of spammers.
The old categories have been converted into tags. New posts will be both categorized and tagged.
Across the top are navigation links. I expect to add a link to reference pages, including links to ISP websites, in the near future. The About section will also be expanded with more information about Word to the Wise.
On a wide browser, the blog is set up as a 3 column blog. The far left column is for posts and content. The middle column has a search box, links to posts in the 4 categories and an Asides box. The Asides box contains links and very short posts and I expect to update this frequently. There is a separate RSS feed for Asides posts.
The far right column has a calendar showing the full month and days with new posts. Clicking on the months under the calendar moves you back and forth through the months. Clicking on the arrows centered under the calendar displays a list of post titles for that month. Under the calendar is a blogroll, and links to recent posts and recent comments. There is an RSS feed available for recent comments.
The 3 column design neatly collapses to a single column design for narrower windows. The far right column folds under the middle column. For very narrow windows, the middle and right columns are folded to the bottom of the page under the main content.
In the content column, main posts have icons indicating what category they are included in, a permanent link to the post (which will act as a trackback link), a link to see other posts in the same category and the author. At the bottom of the post is a link to the comments page. As you scroll down the page, navigation to older pages sits at the top of your browser window, making it easy to move backwards or forwards through the blog.
Clicking on the post title or “more” shows you the whole post and any current comments. There is a navigation bar at the top that lets you navigate across posts (this does not work on some older browsers).
On the comments page, you can read comments, subscribe to a RSS feed for comments to that post and make new comments on a post. There are comment avatars, randomly generated from Gravatar.com. If you have registered at gravatar, that will be displayed for you instead of the monster avatar.
Overall, these changes should make the blog easier to read. We are still tweaking things, so if you have any thoughts, comments or bug reports feel free to comment.
I’m feeing a bit disconnected today. See, my hard drive failed last night and my laptop would not boot. Thanks to the local Apple store Genius bar and Apple Care my current laptop is in getting repaired. Unfortunately, that means I am stuck on my old machine without any of my RSS feeds or bookmarks and a mail client that has taken all day to sync with my IMAP server.
Tomorrow will be better.
On my followup EEC post Tamara comments
The eec made a really bad and ugly mistake but you can take my word for it that they have learned from it and that it will not happen again. I am not going to blog about this because I really do believe in the value of the EEC and what it brings to the industry. It’s okay to call out a mistake, but do you really need to destroy an organization that is so worthwile?
Just to be clear I had not heard of the EEC before this and when the story broke I blew it off as no big deal, some organization did something stupid and spammed. It was only after I did a little research that I realized this was THE organization that was supposed to be leading the pack in email marketing. They are
[...] a global professional organization that strives to enhance the image of email marketing and communications, while celebrating and actively advocating its critical importance in business, and its ROI value.
And, yet, they send mail that was perceived by many of their recipients as spam. While I have not seen copies of the mail, two posters commented that the mail did not comply with CAN SPAM. One of those said there was no opt-out link. Putting aside any of the permission or relevancy questions, if this is true then it takes it from a bad idea to illegal activity. How does this organization maintain any credibility as a leader in the email marketing space?
As for the negative comments, I fully expect that if Word to the Wise pulled something like this, there would be a lot of negativity and people holding us accountable for our actions. I do not see with the EEC should expect anything different from their base.
There was a funny comment from EEC Member pointing out that the EEC had brought us standardization of the spelling of email.
On my Email non-viable for acquisition post, Josh disagreed. He says
I think saying that “email is not viable for customer acquisition” might be too broad of a statement. I wouldn’t have any problem with “Purchasing lists is not viable for customer acquisition.”
I think his point is well taken. There are places where you buy a mailing, or buy an advertisement and that does drive acquisition as well as sales. I am still wary of using email for acquisition as most of the companies who come to me with that business model mean purchasing lists or co-reg when they say acquisition.
There have been a number of comments about Postini. Jay Levitt had a couple of comments that sum up the frustration that many of us have had with Postini.
I too tried to get a human at Postini. I took three different back-channel routes to get there. They all landed at the same person - apparently the one guy who sends out “we’re not responsible no matter what” form letters to anyone who writes to Postini. He told me, and I can’t make this up:
Postini was scoring my e-mails as “spammy” because Postini had previously scored my e-mails as spammy.
Dennis also commented about Postini:
I was told that if you take a document originally typed on an application such as MS Word and then copy and paste this into the marketing e-mail it gives it funky html code that for some reason gives your e-mail a lower score in Postini.
Cutting and pasting from MS Word has a myriad of problems, not just Postini delivery. One thing I emphasize with my clients is that their email structure must be clean and standards compliant. So many spammers out there are using badly formatted HTML mails, that the ISPs are looking at the technical structure of your email and using that as part of their filtering decisions. This confirmation from Postini only reinforces that.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
Blogging was light the last few weeks as I coped with the holidays, visitors and a very nasty cold. I have a backlog of posts I want to write over the next few weeks, including a description of stale list syndrome, information about pitfalls of collecting email addresses at the point of sale, and how to improve your IP reputation.
As I did in 2007, I’ll also keep updating readers to change in Email Standards, continue to update everyone about changes at individual ISPs and comment on the state of the email industry.
I added a few blogs to my blogroll today.
Terry Zink works at Microsoft handling spam blocking issues for one of their platforms. His posts offer insight into how recipient administrators view spam filtering. He has a long, information dense series of posts on email authentication.
E-mail, tech policy, and more is written by John Levine, a general expert on almost everything internet, especially spam and abuse issues. He posts somewhat irregularly about interesting things he sees and hears about spam, abuse, internet law and other things.
Justin Mason’s blog contains information from the primary SpamAssassin developer. Like Terry’s blog, it gives readers some insight into the thought process of people creating filters.
Al Iverson’s blogs have been on my blogroll for a while now. His DNSBL resource contains information about various DNSBL and how they work against a single, well defined mail stream. His spam resource blog provides information about delivery and email marketing from someone who has been in the industry as long as I have.
Email Karma is Matt Verhout’s blog and contains a lot of useful delivery information.
No man is an iland provides practical information on marketing by email. Some of the information is delivery related, a lot more of it is solid marketing information. Mark often points to useful studies and information posted around the net.
MonkeyBrains has always entertaining and informative articles about delivery, email marketing and practical ways to make your email marketing more effective.
Sorry about the slowness, this server is the same one that is hosting thewholeinternet.wordtothewise.com and it got posted to digg today.
If the traffic storm keeps up for more than a day or two we’ll make other arrangements for the blog.
Getting ready to head to MAAWG next week. We leave for the plane in a couple hours. I expect there will be some interesting information coming out of the talks and sessions and will be sharing some of the more interesting bits throughout the week.
Also, Steve has written a new tool to visualize blacklists. He’s put up a beta version. It still has a few bugs and missing features, but there are already some interesting patterns in XBL data with it.
The demo installation only displays XBL data (rather than letting you overlay multiple datasets) and is missing search and bookmarking, amongst other things. Enough disclaimers yet?
