history
Roger Ebert, in addition to having been one of the best movie reviewers out there, is known to me, and to many other spam fighters out there, for having coined “The Boulder Pledge” way back in 1996. The Boulder Pledge is as follows: “Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.” In other words, if you don’t like spam, make sure you don’t buy things from spam, to help minimize the chances of a spammer’s success. Bill Weinman explains more context around the Boulder Pledge here, and shares Roger’s original column promoting the pledge, from way back in the day. Enjoy.
Or…everything old is new again? Or something? Anyway, seedlist-based inbox testing has been around for a while. Pivotal Veracity was offering it up a good twenty years ago. Its heyday, an ex-PVer reminded me the other day, was 2003-2010, and then it was aquired by Unica, which later ended up folded into IBM … which is now Acoustic? I forget. But the inbox testing platform is long retired, I am sure. Anyway, it’s fun to take a look at the tests from years ago and see how much things change and how much things stay the same. Which mailboxes were tested back when this first test was run in early 2008? AOL, AT&T, Bellsouth, Cablevision, Charter, Comcast, CompuServe, Cox, Earthlink, Excite, Gmail, Hotmail, Mail.com, MSN, NetZero/Juno, Road Runner, USA.net, Verizon, Windows Live Mail and Yahoo. A lot of those are since gone or consolidated. I remember Mail.com used to be
I stumbled across this story again this morning, and it’s such a lovely delivery yarn I thought I’d share it. It’s from Trey Harris, and it’s set in the mid 90s. Here’s a problem that *sounded* impossible… I almost regret posting the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a conference. 🙂 The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining. I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department. “We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.” “What’s the problem?” I asked. “We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained. I choked on my latte. “Come again?” “We can’t send mail farther than 500
Here’s a fun overview of the history of email and spam, if you’re looking for such a thing. I could pick a nit here and there about certain points, but this presentation from Dylan Beattie works well as a solid overview. Enjoy.I do need to point out, just for the record, that it is indeed possible to send mail from cloud services like Google Cloud and AWS. I have servers in both. Indeed, the Spam Resource email newsletter is generated from within a Google Cloud server. But Dylan’s meant to be explaining the usual way things work, not potential workarounds and exceptions. (By the way, if you would like to be able to relay mail out through AWS or Google Cloud, just for hobbyist or personal use, drop me a line — maybe I can help.)[ H/T: Jonathan Shusta ]
Where did our little friend, the @ symbol, come from? And why is it on computer keyboards today? It turns out, even if nobody had thought to use it in email, we’d probably still be seeing a @ character dropped in whenever we press shift+2. Why is that? Youtube channel Inkbox has a very thorough explanation, breaking down the history of the @ sign and how it came to be, long before SMTP. Check it out!
That’s right, 21 years ago (yesterday), is more or less when Spam Resource first hit teh interwebs. I invite you to celebrate with a beverage of your choice. Pictured: Murray is enjoying a Best Patio Pils by 18th Street Brewery on the patio at Jarvis Square Tavern, our favorite bar here in Chicago. (And by the way, Chicago, coincidentally, is not quite the hellhole that some dumb guy portrayed it as recently.)
Please join me in wishing a heartfelt CONGRATULATIONS to Matthew Vernhout on reaching a very significant milestone with his EmailKarma blog: 15 years! Matthew’s deliverability blog EmailKarma was born into this world way back in July 2007, and is still out there today, keeping us all updated with his news and views from the deliverability universe! Congrats, good sir!So many good blog resources come and go. People move upward, onward, or out of the industry and leave their websites behind. Or even worse, take them down. It’s a bummer when email marketing resources and good voices succumb to internet bit rot and I’m thankful for Matthew putting in the effort to keep EmailKarma active and up to date.Besides checking out his blog at emailkarma.net, be sure to stop on over to this Linkedin thread to wish him congratulations.(The screenshot is from August 2007, in case you’re wondering. Oh, blog designs were
It’s my first official post for the work blog! With an infographic (sort of) that you can borrow! Over at Kickbox, read about the history of ISP and mailbox provider spam filtering, as remembered by…me! It’s been fun to watch the evolution of email technology, email marketing best practices, spam filtering and more over these past twenty five years. It’s also a good reminder that email is not standing still. It’s not dead tech, it’s not old tech. There’s still new stuff to be learned, every day and every year. Keep learning!That cool graphic I promised? Of course it’s not the one above; I didn’t include it here, as to not spoil the surprise. Click on through to check it out!
I don’t really know who first coined the term deliverability. Was it me? Possibly not. It’s a shame J.D. Falk isn’t still around, because he would know, and then he would also mock me for thinking too much about it. And you know, it might have been he who coined it.When I first started in a deliverability role, my title was actually “consumer privacy manager.” That was in 2001. Later, when I switched companies in 2006, the term “deliverability” had already been out there and established for a few years, so I became a Director of Deliverability. Meaning that sometime between 2001 and 2006 is when I (and the email industry) started using the term deliverability. But when?For fun, I decided to try to find the oldest mention of the word “deliverability” on my blog. That seems to be dated May 18, 2003, captured by the Internet Archive on June…
From the Atlantic and WNYC: Uh…finally? The podcast you’ve been waiting for! This is “a story of America told through the history of SPAM.” In this three-part series as part of the Experiment podcast, they’ll try to answer “some of the meatiest questions the United States faces about how we work for the food we eat play out in the story of special processed American meat.” I’m not entirely sure what to make of this one. Let’s compare notes after we listen, shall we? Because there’s no way you’re not going to listen to a podcast about America’s favorite tinned meat. More info: The Atlantic | WNYC