Tag: Laura Atkins

Don’t opt-out of spam?

Yesterday, Laura Atkins wrote a blog post which suggests that unsubscribing from spam doesn’t result in receiving more spam ​(Atkins 2013)​. I know that this is a project that she’s been working on for at least a month, and I don’t have any reason to doubt her results. Additionally, she links to ​(Magill 2013)​, ​(Pogue 2013)​,… Read More

Why Does All of This Matter?

Sometimes, you just want to beat your head against your desk, put your head in your hands and cry, and then beat your head against the wall. I’m kind of at that point at the moment. Why? “Probably,” as Jack Handy once said about the reason why raindrops would be God’s tears, “because of something… Read More

Number 11 is a nice place to be

Sometimes we can get too close to something.  So close, in fact, that we take comments the wrong way so that they become insults that they were never intended to be. A couple of years ago, a member of the postmaster staff at a large, North American ISP said to a group of ESP people:… Read More

Asking for the impossible: SLAs

Just a few days ago, I wrote that I cannot give a guarantee that an intervention on my part will get you removed from a DNSBL. Why? Because I won’t agree to terms that will bind me to making someone use do something. I figured that I would follow that up by looking at some… Read More

Can I Help You?

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… Read More

When is a press release an advertisement?

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″… Read More

Email is about relationships

Did you know that it’s entirely possible to learn the wrong lessons? Well, it is. I use Zemanta to suggest possible links for blog posts. As I was writing yesterday’s blog post, a suggested link came up dealing with CAN-SPAM and the definition of “spam”. That post by Roger Bauer shows how some people just… Read More