Al Iverson
I try not to do a lot of “name and shame,” but when something like this hits the news, it’s important to let the world know, to remind us that sending unsolicited marketing email can indeed come back to bite the sender in the rear end. In this case, it’s UK bike and car accessory retailer Halfords, fined nearly $35,000 by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office’s for sending just under half a million unsolicited marketing email messages. Read all about it at the Register.
More fun, more webinars, more info, all about Apple Mail Privacy Protection, aka MPP!If you’re curious about the current state of Apple MPP and how it impacts marketers, my Kickbox colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz and I presented a live webinar on this very topic recently. Head on over to the Kickbox blog where you can read a recap of the webinar and view the webinar recording.
Long week? Yeah, I’m feeling it, too. Let’s take a few minutes for a break, shall we, and enjoy Feel Good Inc. by Gorillaz, a fun song from 2005.
Encrypted email service CTemplar has shut down as of May 26, 2022.Security website The Daily Swig reports that, “No reason was given for the closure of the service. However, it comes less than one year after a system failure meant that some customer data was ‘irrecoverably lost.'”It looks as though their primary email domain was likely ctemplar.com. They also supported custom domains and I see at least a handful of custom domains out in the wild in the dot com DNS zone that can no longer receive mail, as their MX records pointed to mail.ctemplar.com, which no longer exists. Best to suppress as much of this as your sending ESP or CRM platform can identify.
Hey, Pardot users! Looking for a recorded webinar that covers on deliverability best practices, how to maximize deliverability success when sending via the Pardot (aka Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) B2B email platform? Well, we’ve got you covered right here at Spam Resource. On August 24, 2022 Ben LaMothe hosted a Tampa Pardot User Group meeting, and invited me to attend. We talked about how best to keep a clean house (meaning clean data) in Pardot, what your options are for data cleanup, as well as touching on deliverability best practices and how to use Pardot’s built-in features to help boost your engagement and, by extension, boost your deliverability success. Check out the recording below, and don’t check out Ben’s Pardot tips and tricks blog at PardotGeeks.com and his recent article for DemandGen on this very topic.
Who hosts the most inbound B2B email or mailboxes? I don’t have big data from a large email sending platform nowadays, so it’s not something I could easily answer from subscriber list data. In a perfect world, I’d love to look at thousands of B2B client email lists and analyze them by domain breakdown — and then roll up the domain breakdowns by MX record — to find a clear picture of an average of B2B email hosting provider across that client data.And I did that, once upon a time, where I used to work. When I crunched that data a few years ago, I found a lot of the usual suspects (Google, Microsoft), but I did not see a lot of depth with regard to actual mailbox provider services focused only on the business environment. That made it difficult to broaden the view of the B2B universe beyond the
It’s webinar time again! And it’s time to start thinking about the holiday season. I know, I know, you get mad (as do I) if Target or Walmart puts out the year-end holiday trinkets before we’ve even gotten as far as Halloween. But we both know that when it comes to email marketing success for the final two months of the year, the earlier you start preparing, the better off you’ll be. How exactly do you put your best foot forward, what should you do, and what should you not do, to ensure best inbox placement during this most important time of the email marketing year. My Kickbox colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz and I will guide you through everything you need to know (or at least everything we know) with regard to preparing to ramp up your holiday email marketing efforts. We’ll also be sure to save time to take
Maine telecom and internet provider UniTel is getting out of the email mailbox hosting business. It sounds as though the email domains will simply be shutdown (on November 1st) and not transitioned. Bummer, man.From their website: UniTel is discontinuing free email services by 11/1/22. You will no longer have access to your free @unitel.me or @bluestreakme.com emails as of 11/1/22. This is a necessary change to realign our service offerings to be more competitive. Customers can now drop phone services and subscribe to higher speeds of internet at a lower monthly cost.The coming shutdown has “irked” some customers.
Rene Holt writing for We Live Security has shared a recent tale that gives me pause: What can go wrong if you get your SPF record wrong. Usually the risk here is that you make your SPF record too restrictive, resulting in the rejection of legitimate mail. But here’s an alternate case — what if your SPF record is so wide, so broad, that bad guys can easily send spam from certain IPs and pass authentication checks, successfully pretending to be you (or at least, successfully sending from your domain).I think the moral of the story is that you’ve got to get SPF right, both in how tight and how loose your SPF record should be. Don’t just blindly add a zillion IP addresses because somebody told you to; investigate and question and review.Rene Holt: How a spoofed email passed the SPF check and landed in my inbox
Back in June, Jennifer Nespola Lantz and I hosted a Kickbox Live session where we explained what a BIMI logo is, which ISPs support it, and we gave our recommendations on moving forward with a BIMI sender logo. And we even took time to answer a bunch of questions. And the info we shared then is still the latest and greatest with regard to BIMI status, so if you’re curious as to what this whole BIMI logo thing is and what you should be doing about it, feel free to head on over to the Kickbox blog and check it out.And don’t forget, I’ve got a whole BIMI section here on Spam Resource, including current and upcoming (Apple) mailbox provider support, what to do if you’re seeing the wrong logo, how to “fake it ’til you make it” at Gmail, learn how to create an animated logo, and more!