Willem Stam wants to know: Are you ready to join Postmastery to work on email deliverability & MTA's? Check out this job posting and see!

If you join Postmastery as a Deliverability Consultant, "you will be part of a team of email specialists providing solutions and services to professional email senders all over the globe. On a day-to-day basis we work for smaller, medium and large senders like Booking.com, WIX.com, NP6, Adestra, Moosend and Microsoft. Many clients use on-premise systems based on PowerMTA. Other clients use other MTAs like Postfix and various email service providers like SparkPost or SendGrid."

Responsibilities include "setting up and integrating on-premise email systems, often based on PowerMTA, doing deliverability assessments, consulting clients to implement email delivery best practices and working with customers on a day-to-day basis to monitor performance and troubleshoot delivery problems."

Click here for more info or to apply .

Značky: #postmastery, #Network

From CNBC : “That’s incredible. We’ve had to announce new capacity that we’re going to bring online in 2023 to meet the demand, so Spam is as strong as it’s ever been,” [according to Hormel CEO Jim Snee.]

A similar article from BBC News adds that " the firm's boss said it will start work on expanding its range of Spam products next year." Ooh, I wonder what that could mean. Vegan spam ?

Značky: #Network

Ask Al: We're a restaurant that just opened. We signed up for an email service provider (ESP) platform and we're looking to buy email lists to get started. Where should we start?

Hey! Thanks for reaching out, but I wanted to warn you that email list purchasing isn't the way to go here. It's problematic for multiple reasons (poor deliverability, angry recipients, poorly targeted traffic) and just about every email service provider prohibits use of purchased lists. Run away from vendors telling you that their lists contain people who did really opt-in to hear from you -- they’re typically lying. Here is just one example of why you should avoid this.

An organically grown email list for a restaurant or entertainment venue is a valuable asset and people don't usually give away that asset to others, not even for a modest fee. Meaning if somebody is offering to sell you a list, it's either questionably opt-in, or it could even be stolen. I once got spammed by a restaurant who had an employee who stole an email list from a prior restaurant they worked for. It was scummy to see and I'm pretty sure the response wasn't positive.

Instead, consider a few different methods to grow your email list from the ground up. Here’s what I would recommend for starters.

1. Make sure you have clear and easy email list signup options on your website. On every page. Very noticeably so. Some people actually want to be able to sign up for your emails when they find your website. Don't make it hard for them to do so!
2. Look for Chamber of Commerce-like groups, local neighborhood discussion groups, local foodie blogs or groups, etc., that you could potentially partner with. Ask them if they’d be willing to send out an email or partner with you to help promote your business and email list. If they are able to send out emails to help advertise you, ask them if they can include and track an option to invite people to opt-in to your email list. Or at least drive that traffic to a page on your website where people can easily opt-in. With Facebook groups and discussion boards, ask the admin if it's OK to post a bit about your restaurant there. Most neighborhood groups like hearing about new restaurants.
3. Depending on what your budget is and where you are, considered paid search. This is where you pay to place ads in Google based on certain “keywords” that people use for searches. Like “restaurants in (your town)” or terms for the type of cuisine you sell. You can often limit these geographically to help focus marketing efforts to only your area. Set a low budget in the system while you test this out, so you don't accidentally spend hundreds of dollars a day while you figure out how paid search works.
4. Similarly, Facebook ads are another option. Not my area of expertise, but there are plenty of guides out there. Here's one of them .
5. Work with a digital agency or marketing partner to help you develop an email marketing growth strategy. I know a number of them but I'm hesitant to just broadly list them here, knowing that who you should work with is going to vary based on your needs and budget. This is another area where a Chamber of Commerce-style local business group or association could help guide you toward a vendor partner.
6. Search, read and learn. There's lots of expertise out there being shared already. Take it all in . Just watch out for the "too good to be true" bits where you see stuff like people offering you a billion website visitors for fifty cents. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

I've actually done all this myself before; going back a number of years, I helped my friend's jazz club build an online presence and using SEO, paid search and organic website traffic to build their email list up to over 5,000 subscribers. (And even though the club has closed, we resurrected the email list and still send out emails to it every once in a while.) Back in this early time it wasn't always easy to measure how well our email campaigns were working, untiol we found out the silly way -- when we typo'd a cover charge in an email, lots of people came through the door expecting to pay the wrong price. It's not a practice I recommend, but it sure let us know that the emails were doing well to inform customers and potential customers about upcoming shows. What you could and should do, though, is offer specials or discounts or a spiff that only email recipients are given access to. That'll help you denote success or failure.

Good luck! And remember that spam doesn't pay. Sending unwanted emails won't make you money, and it'll just make people upset with you.

Značky: #Network, #spam

I had a customer ask me yesterday, why is their ESP trying to force them to implement CAPTCHA on their signup forms? They're not spammers.

Well, unfortunately, it's usually because of stuff like this: As Webbula's Jenna Devinney explains , bad guys can easily find and script a bunch of pokes at a bunch of webforms, purely to wreak havoc. Maybe it's random. Maybe it is to annoy somebody they're mad at. But the net is, they go around signing up Joe Email User for 200 email lists and then Joe Email User starts receiving 200 emails a day that are all spam to him, and it makes him mad. It makes him hate the companies sending that mail, even though it wasn't really their fault. It makes him report all that mail as spam, and that'll harm the sender's IP and domain reputation.

Even worse, the bad guys sometimes script submissions to trigger mail to spamtrap addresses, trying to get senders blocked by Spamhaus, other blocklists, or ISPs.

So, I would do it -- I recommend that you do go ahead and implement a CAPTCHA. It's probably not hard and it's definitely becoming a best practice. And you're not alone. I implemented ReCAPTCHA on my own WombatMail signup forms , because some goober seemed to think it was fun to try submitting "abuse" and "network" addresses just to see if they could get me in trouble. (Sigh.) If I hadn't have done that, eventually I would have run into problems, too. Even with double opt-in.

Indeed, I've seen a lot of mostly-good senders get into trouble with Spamhaus over the past couple of years and I think this type of mailbombing/scriptbombing email form abuse is probably the reason why. If you can prevent it before it ends up causing a Spamhaus listing, do so! This truly is one of those scenarios where an ounce of prevention is worth MORE than a pound of cure. Having to re-confirm a list because of a Spamhaus listing is no fun and will decimate your marketing efforts. It's much less painful to add a bit more logic up front to keep the bots from submitting garbage to your forms, if you ask me.

Značky: #Webbula, #recaptcha, #spamhaus, #bots, #Network

Sendlane, "born and raised in sunny San Diego," is looking for a VP of Engineering.

"Reporting to the CEO and working closely with the CTO and other VP leadership, you would be joining an Engineering team dedicated to building out the next phase of the Sendlane platform. Practicing the Agile methodology, we operate on 2 week sprints and have daily stand-ups that ensure collaborative productivity and high-output amongst the team. As it relates to your experience, it would be great if you had any with eMail or eCommerce, but our absolute non-negotiables are that you must have experience with  distributed systems, big data, scale/architecture and SaaS platforms. "

Could that be you? Click here for more information and/or to apply . (Scroll down to Engineering under Open Opportunities.)

Značky: #Network, #sendlane

SocketLabs’ Brian Godiksen and Campaign Monitor’s Travis Hazlewood joined forces in this excellent blog post to explain what can go wrong when you use a subdomain (under a domain you don't own) to send mail. Example? Some registrars offer up this goofy thing where you can buy a "domain" "under" uk.com, like spamresource.uk.com. Neat idea, except it's really just a subdomain. And the domain uk.com has a poor reputation at Gmail, making it kind of hard to get email delivered to the inbox reliably, if I use a uk.com subdomain as my sending domain.

So as to not totally steal their thunder, I'll make you click on through to get their thoughts on what to do instead, and how to measure risk with regard to your choice of TLD (top level domain). This is one you need to read before you buy a new domain name to use for email!

Značky: #socketlabs, #domains, #reputation, #tld, #Network, #campaignmonitor

I can't tell if this article from Joe Queenan for the Wall Street Journal (paywall; sorry) is a joke or not.

Relevant excerpt: "Just one example [of legitimate email going to the spam folder]: In recent years, a great deal of criticism has been leveled at the Swedish Academy for its baffling awards of the Nobel Prize for Literature to writers no one has ever heard of. It turns out this is because the emails offering the Nobel keep going to the authors’ spam folders. Because the winners never reply, the prize goes to the next person on the list. But sometimes that person doesn’t get the email either. It might take 19 writers before one does."

The guy's a satirist, so maybe that's a clue. But, legit email getting caught up in spam is a real problem. One that I get asked about quite a bit. If anybody has any contacts the Nobel Committee, feel free to let them know that I'm ready and able to assist with any deliverability questions they might have.

Značky: #news, #spam, #funny, #Network, #stupid, #wsj

Cheetah Digital is looking for a Senior Deliverability Consultant. Remote is an option.

They're looking for somebody who can "work directly with customers to help guide them and resolve their deliverability problems in a timely manner" and who knows all the best practices, deliverability tools and remediation steps that those in our space would be expected to know. Could that be you? Click here for more info and/or to apply .

Značky: #cheetahmail, #Network

And since Yahoo just announced that they are fully pulling out of China , you can consider that the final answer. That, as they say, is that.

I'm guessing that the resurrection I stumbled across in 2019 might have had something to do with the transition of Yahoo Mail's Chinese users to Alibaba ? But I don't have an easy way to confirm it, and at at this point, it doesn't really matter, as there's not much a sender can do about it today. (Were the Yahoo domains ever that big in China, anyway? I was always more concerned with delivery to qq.com, 163.com, 126.com, and a handful of others. Yahoo was never on my top domain list for China.)

Značky: #Network, #yahoo, #china