Al Iverson
Over on the Validity blog, my friend Travis Murray has provided an update on the current status of that Gmail pilot program to allow some political senders to in theory be able to bypass some spam filters. Read it and be informed.The whole thing makes me itch. There are just too many apples to give everybody one bite, as I mentioned before.And My colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz worries that this “is a flat degradation of trust for the end user” and I concur.So…what comes next here? Get ready to start sliding down that slippery slope here, folks.
It’s Friday! Do you need a bit of a palette cleanser after a long and difficult week? Well, me, too. And here it is: Buzzfeed’s Megan Liscomb with “29 Extremely Bizarre Email Sign Offs That Have Inspired Me To Start Sending Weirder Emails.” Best fishes to all, and be sure to govern yourself accordingly.
“Email Unicorn” aka digital marketing professional Michelle Miles doesn’t want you to use the term “blast” when talking about email marketing campaigns. I agree, and her reasoning is sound and you should read it for yourself. (And then you should follow her on Medium!)
DELIVTERMS: The (almost) weekly series here on Spam Resource that defines deliverability terminology. Today, I’m going to talk about Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Mailbox Providers (MBPs).ISPs and MBPs: Talk to any deliverability consultant and you’ve likely heard the two terms thrown around. What do these acronyms actually mean?ISP means Internet Service Provider, and you’ll find me guilty of using this as a catch all term for any place that a big email sender would be sending email messages to. Even though I include Gmail and Yahoo, on this list, for example, that’s a bit inexact in that true ISPs are companies that provide internet access to their subscribers. Think Comcast and Spectrum.MBP means Mailbox Provider, and that is perhaps a bit more accurately used as a catchall term for any service that provides email addresses for users to receive mail at. How you measure who the largest provider is
Timely! I just blogged recently talking about what you should do if you get blocklisted by Spamhaus, and now Spamhaus just posted this: Poor sending practices trigger a tidal wave of informational listings. What does it all mean and should you be concerned? Let me explain.What Spamhaus is referring to is a recent uptick in SBL entries (blocklistings) for ESP/CRM senders — informational listings — that were almost like a big ole bomb dropped out of nowhere. ESPs were waking up to a dozen or more listings for their clients, seemingly out of nowhere, wondering what changed.To make this a little bit easier to handle, these new listings are “informational” in nature. “Informational listings” are something that Spamhaus has done for a while now, where they will warn you of an SBL listing, but not actually configure the listing to cause mail to block. It means the client or company sending
Here’s a great article from Sella Yoffe over on the Webbula blog, where he provides an overview of Apple’s “Hide my Email” functionality and helps explain the challenges this functionality presents to email marketers: Apple Hide My Email – A Burner Phone for Email: How Does Apple Hide My Email Affect Email Marketers.Want to learn more about Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP)? Don’t forget to check out the Apple MPP section here on Spam Resource. And stay tuned for a recap and recording link for the recent Apple MPP webinar I co-presented! Coming soon.
Yahoo is hiring! For Yahoo Mail alone, they’ve got thirty-three posted positions! Lots of opportunity to contribute to the Yahoo Mail backend, and I am reliably informed that it’s a good place to work.Look at all these possible jobs! Since the list is so long, I’ll just link you directly to the Yahoo Careers site, where you can search by “Brand: Yahoo Mail” to find these.Job listings include:Software Apps Engineer I/IISenior Software Dev EngineerSoftware Dev Engineer – Yahoo MailSoftware Engineer IISoftware Apps EngineeriOS EngineerProduct Marketing Manager, Yahoo MailSr. Manager, Production Engineering — Yahoo!Sr Software Apps EngineerSoftware Engineer II – Yahoo MailSoftware Dev Engineer IISoftware Dev EngSoftware Apps Engineer I – iOSSenior Software EngineerSoftware Dev EngSr. Product Manager, CommerceSoftware Apps Engineer II – iOSSoftware Dev Engineer IISoftware Development Engineer IISenior Android Engineer – Yahoo MailPrinc Software Apps EngineerPrincipal Software EngineerSenior Software Dev EngineerSr. Product Manager, Yahoo MailPrinc. Production EngineerSr. Product Manager
It’s always good to take another look at email functionality through a security lens. Head on over to Krebs on Security to check out “The Security Pros and Cons of Using Email Aliases,” by the man himself, Brian Krebs. (And a side note to Brian: DALL-E can be great help and a bit of fun if you’re struggling to figure out what kind of graphic to include in a new blog post!)
After finding some shockingly bad advice out there on other websites (no, I’m not the type to name and shame), I thought that it might be a good idea to write up my own thoughts on what senders should do if blocklisted by Spamhaus, published over on the Kickbox blog.I could have gone into much more detail here, but my goal was do get a high level overview completed quickly, and I’ll probably include followups on other Spamhaus bits (like the DBL) in future posts. (And keep in mind that I’ve got a whole section on Spam Resource dedicated to Spamhaus.)
B2B email deliverability is different than B2C. It’s more of a wild west, providers are more numerous; while Microsoft and Google do host mail for bajillions of B2B domains, overall there are so many more B2B mailbox providers, all hosting smaller pieces of the corporate email pie; with nowhere near the same level of consolidation seen in the B2C/DTC email realm.More than that, there are two things unique to the B2B marketing space:Cold leads / unsolicited marketing mail, aka spam, is much more prevalent in the B2B realm. I get B2B spam, you get B2B spam, we probably all get B2B spam, and that can make people assume that it’s an accepted practice – though it’s really not – and that it works well – even though it I’m not sure it does. (And if you want to argue otherwise, let me remind you that there are too many apples.)Email