Email Blogs
Another week is drawing to a close, and I think that means it’s time for another music break. If Katy Perry doesn’t make you want to get up and dance, you might be dead inside. Enjoy!Thank you to Denise Miller for the suggestion!
Will Easton is an expert email strategist and nonprofit fundraiser, and the webmaster of ethicalemail.org. He was recently laid off and looking for work, so feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn or by email to weaston@igc.org.Today’s topic? The deluge of fundraising spam you’re likely to receive after making a political contribution and handing over your email address.First, let me make it clear that I’ve managed email communities for generally progressive nonprofits, B2C companies & candidates throughout my career, so my focus here is on that side of the aisle. Republican email fundraising is a separate kettle of fish with its own problems, highlighted in this piece from the NY Times focusing on the Trump campaign … as well as a followup article pointing out that elderly donors to both parties are particularly susceptible to unethical tactics, and represent a disproportionate share of refunds requested for donations they don’t
Rackspace appears to have suffered a security issue related to their Hosted Exchange mailbox environment, starting on December 2nd. You can find more information here, here and here.From what I can tell, their Hosted Exchange systems make up only a small portion of the overall mailbox provider infrastructure hosted by Rackspace. Doing a quick check against the top 10 million domains suggests that the vast majority of mail traffic to Rackspace is handled by their non-Exchange infrastructure. Less than 1% of the Rackspace-hosted domains in the top 10 million domains point at the affected Exchange services. Rackspace’s MX records typically look like mx*.emailsrvr.com for non-Exchange-using domains, and mex*.emailsrvr.com for Hosted Exchange infrastructure-using customers.Sender impact is thus likely to be small — you’ll see a bit of bouncing at a handful of affected domains, as they’re not able to accept mail at this time. If you’re a mail/IT admin at an
Email/technology expert Mike Hillyer has put together a list of six very smart email/technology people that were affected by recent layoffs or other job upheaval.The group is a diverse set of experts, starting with a specialist in customer engagement (Tom Mairs), running support teams (Scott Habict), providing expert deliverability guidance (Josie Garcia), bringing Agile product/project prowess (Klaudia Piaskowska), Java back-end development mastery (Alex Drake) and providing strategy/marketing expertise (Jeremy Wright). Any and all of these fine folks would be good hires for companies in need of their particular expertise.Click on through to read a bit of detail about each of them, with links to each individual. And thank you, Mike, for pulling this together to help our email community assist friends in need!
It’s infographic time! This one breaks down the top 25 mailbox providers in the UK, as measured by this methodology:Any domain in the “top 10 million domains” (as measured by various online tools),And that domain name ends in .uk, the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the United Kingdom,Analyze and roll up counts of all the MX records/email hosting for all of those domains;And thus, we have how many “top 10 million .uk domains” each of these mailbox providers hosts,Which probably makes this breakdown mostly B2B-oriented, and B2C mail tends to be more oriented toward many users at a small number of domains, and very few of these domains are going to be freemail/webmail domains.This ranking by number of domains is not quite the same as noting how much email traffic (or how many messages) each service handles, inbound or outbound, but’s I don’t have access to that, do
It’s been a long week. Let’s get weird.The song: “Frontier Psychiatrist” by the Avalanches. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here, but it’s a fun collage of sound.
Cablevision, Optonline, and Suddenlink cable internet services all seem to be owned by Altice USA, a company spun out from the European telecommunications provider Altice.Altice USA is a collection of brands brought together via multiple acquisitions, and Altice USA has outsourced email service for these domains to a company called Synchronoss. Alas, I wasn’t able to find any email postmaster/deliverability-specific contact information for Synchronoss, but with this list of domains you could at least easily configure and adjust throughput and throttle settings as necessary.Cablevision, Optonline, and Suddenlink Email Domains include: aamasonryinc.com, abcts.com, alphalabsusa.com, anatolelubbock.com, apexsurvey.com, bmsnr.com, brannonoil.com, brantoncompany.com, caddost.com, calvaryandrews.com, candcmachinery.com, carlbrowncpa.com, carolinacourtreporters.com, cebridge.net, chamber.huntsville.tx.us, cityofwinfieldtx.com, classicnet.net, cobbholmanlumber.com, edhauto.com, gatewaysnyder.com, gibraltarenergy.com, halfmannrealty.com, harrellfinancialservices.com, heritagehomessnyder.com, highagency.com, hoodtoolingandmachine.com, jacksonmelons.com, jayadkins.com, johnmclarkinc.com, kccrop.com, kiffe.com, kingwoodcable.com, kingwoodcable.net, npgcable.com, optimum.net, optonline.com, optonline.net, ponyexpress.net, stfrancis-wv.org, stjoelive.com, suddenlink.net, suddenlinkmail.com, tyler.net, uneedspeed.net.Note that this list may include the domains of some customers of Altice USA. All MX records
You’ve seen the advice: “Just avoid these 18 spam trigger words and always get to the inbox!” I’ve been doing this a long time and somebody new pops up with guidance like this a few times a year, and it’s just absolute bullshit, and it’s been bullshit for years.Spam filters don’t work that way. They are not so simplistic that just a word or two from a static list are going to tank your inbox placement.Content does matter, to some degree, yes. Meaning that yes, what you say or include in your email messages can have an impact on inbox placement. But as far as ranking how important content is, it is third, usually a distant third place, behind IP and domain sending reputation.Don’t believe me? Here’s Magan Le from Litmus with “Why spam trigger words are a thing of the past,” where she sums it up nicely.Truth be told
Thanks to Cyrill Gross from Mailix, we now have first impressions of the new Zoom email client. Note that this is NOT the new “zmail.com” email service — it’s the email client application — and it runs as part of the Zoom desktop client on Mac or Windows. A user configures it to access an existing email account, and currently only Gmail and Microsoft accounts are supported (in addition to accounts on Zoom’s own email service). Anyway, I don’t want to give too much away before linking, so click on through to learn more.
Eleven years ago, Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise warned: Using bit.ly to shorten links in your emails will get you blocked. Indeed, Spamhaus made a change back around that time that led me to warn that link shortening tools were likely to end up blocklisted more often.Fast forward a bit and it’s still something to be wary of. Last year I warned that Gmail seemed to be putting messages in the spam folder if they contained Bitly links. That may or may not still be the case today (probably isn’t, right at this exact second, but tomorrow is another day).So what should you do if you want short links and/or the tracking afforded to you by way of using Bitly or other link shortening services? You’ve got options, and I covered those options earlier this year.TL;DR? Use a custom domain for tracking or short links whenever possible.