For the life of the Internet, the art of protecting online e-mail addresses has rested upon the ability of web developers to come up with effective ways to sort man from machine.  In short, a CAPTCHA.

If a machine can identify and grab your e-mail address, you will become a target for SPAM - but removing your e-mail altogether is not an option if you want to provide legitimate clients and leads with a way to reach you without having to leave their computer.

When I first started looking at website code (back when a 28.8 baud audio modem was state of …

As business owners, most of us realize the importance of being “top-of-mind” in our customers’ eyes, and we use e-mail newsletters to tell them about new products or information they may not be aware of. Many businesses that use e-mail newsletters to market to their customers however, miss a huge opportunity to help their own online marketing efforts.

E-mail Newsletters Can Help Your Web Site

Online marketing is often referred to as “search engine optimization” or “SEO” or “internet marketing”. The idea is to get your Web site so it shows up in Google’s index of results on the search engine results …

What is it about an online article that makes people forward it on to their acquaintances?  Is it a feel good story? Practical advice? The unexpected?

According to a recently concluded study of the New York Times  all three play a factor, but the most important element is whether or not a story can evoke a feeling of awe.

There is no science to evoking awe, but there are some patterns that you can look for.

• Does your writing evoke a feeling of vastness, that there is something greater than you and your reader?
• Does your article tell the reader …
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SPAM is the ultimate form of shotgun marketing.  Most SPAM marketers expect fewer than 1 in 5000 e-mail recipients to ever follow one of their links (and less still to actually buy the product advertised on the other side).  In order to support such an inaccurate form of marketing, spammers need to build up huge pools of e-mail addresses at very little cost.

That’s where e-mail spam-bots come in.  According to Wikipedia:
E-mail spambots harvest e-mail addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited e-mail, also known as spam. Such spambots are web crawlers that can gather …

Gentle Reader,

E-mail correspondence, like all business communication, plays a balancing act between formality and efficiency.  But there are other features that are unique to e-mails.

One in particular made compiling this list especially difficult:

There are actually two …

This week I conclude my series on e-mail deliverability inspired by the Lyris Inc panel featuring Michael Kelly of Click Mail Marketing, Craig Spiezie of the Online Trust Alliance, and David Fowler of Lyris Technologies.  If you enjoyed this series, or found it useful, please comment on this post.

Origins of the term SPAM

Anyone telling you that SPAM is an acronym (at least in regards to its online usage) is pulling your leg.  It comes from Monty Python’s SPAM skit, where SPAM manages …

This week I continue my series on e-mail deliverability inspired by the Lyris Inc panel featuring Michael Kelly of Click Mail Marketing, Craig Spiezie of the Online Trust Alliance, and David Fowler of Lyris Technologies.

A Quick Recap

Last week we discussed the importance of letting members of your mailing list chose to opt out, and also to periodically ask them to opt back in so that your least engaged readers will weed themselves out before they’re tempted to hit the dreaded SPAM button.

What E-Mail Monitoring …

This week I continue my series on e-mail deliverability inspired by the Lyris Inc panel featuring Michael Kelly of Click Mail Marketing, Craig Spiezie of the Online Trust Alliance, and David Fowler of Lyris Technologies.

Giving Your Mailing List What They Want

The CAN-SPAM act legally defined SPAM as unsolicited bulk e-mail. However, the truth is that solicitation has very little to do with whether or not someone hits the dreaded SPAM button when viewing an e-mail. The real measure that most people will …

This week I continue my series on e-mail deliverability inspired by the Lyris Inc panel featuring Michael Kelly of Click Mail Marketing, Craig Spiezie of the Online Trust Alliance, and David Fowler of Lyris Technologies.

Beyond Compliance and Authentication

CAN-SPAM compliance defines the bare minimum standards you must observe to keep from being legally culpable.  Authentication guarantees that nobody else’s actions will impact the deliverability of your e-mail.  However, it is entirely possible that your own actions could impact your e-mail deliverability, even if you never …

This week I continue my series on e-mail deliverability inspired by the Lyris Inc panel featuring Michael Kelly of Click Mail Marketing, Craig Spiezie of the Online Trust Alliance, and David Fowler of Lyris Technologies.

In the Beginning

When the internet began, it was dominated by academic and government agencies.  Such agencies had little reason to hide their own identities or mimic the identities of others.  As a result, a system was built that made it easy to apply domain names (like @stanford.edu or @whitehouse.gov) as …