Can I Help You?
21 April 2010
I just finished an Emergency Medical Responder course. I’m not a paramedic, I’m not even an EMT, but I am now qualified to stop and give people help until those folks show up. As I reflect on the course, I see some parallels to email marketing. Over the next few days, I’ll be talking about…
When is a press release an advertisement?
3 March 2010
One of the first things I learned when I became a legal assistant is that there are rarely any pat answers. A blanket assertion is almost always wrong. (Did you see the attorney-like weasel wording there?) There has been an interesting discussion on Twitter today regarding a February [acp author=”Michael Arrington” publisher=”Techcrunch” year=”2010″ month=”February” day=”19″…
“The recession has forced us to drop this etiquette.”
22 February 2010
semantics definition se·man·tics (-tiks) noun the branch of linguistics concerned with the nature, the structure, and the development and changes of the meanings of speech forms, or with contextual meaning semiotics the branch of semiotics dealing with relationships of signs and symbols to the things to which they refer, or with referential meaning the relationships…
The Eleventh Commandment
3 February 2010
When you do business with a government agency, at just about any level, you surrender a certain amount of privacy. Whatever you give to the agency is likely going to be subject to so-called “sunshine” laws that go by names like “Freedom of Information” or “Freedom of Access.” Recently, some sportsmen have discovered this the hard…
When is transactional mail not transactional anymore?
2 December 2009
An interesting question came across my desk this morning. Here’s the request from someone we’ll call “Joe”: I need some help understanding CAN-SPAM requirements. I represent a membership organization. From time to time, we send marketing message to our members and, of course, some of the unsubscribe from those messages. Now we are getting to…
The hard truth about email
30 November 2009
Many clients expect email to be sort of an automatic thing. The thinking is “I should hit ‘Send’ and it should arrive within moments.” So, sometimes those of us who work in email hear comments like the following: I understand that these delays may not be your fault, but we can’t have delays. and: It’s…
Use Private Domain Registration and Go to Jail?
4 November 2009
The 9th Circuit opinion in USA v. Kilbride has been released. This is primarily an obscenity case against the defendants for sending pornographic spam email. But, it also includes a challenge to 18 U.S.C. § 1037 on vagueness grounds. 18 U.S.C. § 1037 is the part of the [acp id=”Wikimedia-01″ media=”wiki” title=”CAN-SPAM Act of 2003″…
Filters are stupid
3 November 2009
Sometimes it bears remembering that many content filters aren’t score-based, but rather string-based. Because of this, you may have to more carefully craft your messages to deal with the fact that the filter cannot take context into account. And so, today I wish to share with you three different strings actually seen to have caused…
Pottery warriors are standing by…
19 October 2009
…but they’re impotent and broken. On Saturday, I took the kids to the Houston Museum of Natural History to see its exhibit of the famous Chinese Terracotta Army. One of the things that I keep stressing to my kids as we have started homeschooling them is that history is all about the stories, not the…