Tag Archives: Email

The Many Words on Spam and Email

Posted by admin on March 8, 2008 None comments

spamYears ago when I first began blogging, I thought I’d blog alot about spam. I’ve had plenty of opportunity, and have done minor posts here and there over the years – either here or on the Return Path blog, but never did keep the momentum going.

I guess the biggest reason I don’t blog more about spam still is that there are lots of other folks blogging about spam – and their doing a pretty darn good job, so what else could there be to add?

Here’s some of the spam blogs I follow:

The Spam Diaries by Ed Falk
Al Iverson’s Spam Resource
E-mail, tech policy and more by John Levine
SpamSuite.com
Terry Zinks Anti-spam Blog
Word to the Wise

There are a lot more than this – but these are the ones that I enjoy. Also, Planet Antispam, I think by Mr. Levine, seems to aggregate at least three of the above blogs if you want a one stop shop.

There are *many* blogs on E-mail marketing and deliverability, and while they may touch on spam, they are really focused on the better sides of email. Blogs I enjoy in this category include:

Return Path’s Online Resource Center for Email Marketers – (of course I’d list this!)
The Email Wars
Campaign Monitor Blog
Maximizing Deliverability
No man is an iland
Email Karma

As far as Internet Privacy blogs go, I haven’t found many, but here are a few I track:

BenEdelman.org
Chapell Blog
Privacy.org

I suppose I could blog more Privacy stuff, but face it, privacy stuff is dry and boring on the face of it. Yeah that’s a big part of my career, and although privacy online and data issues continue to get more and more relevant to ecommerce and business online, it is not a topic folks clamor to chat about.

I probably enjoy email deliverability blogs the least – maybe because I feel like I know all that stuff (and I probably don’t) or maybe it just feels like continue rehash of a lot of unchanging basics (don’t be an evil spammer or inadvertently behave like one). Maybe I’ve just worked in email WAY TOO LONG.

The anti-spam stuff is good – John Levine and Terry Zink hit good topics, are clear and succinct, and always have an interesting perspective that I usually don’t hear elsewhere.

So, all that said, I may try to pick up the pen a bit more on “spam” – maybe there is more to add on this nowadays. We’ll see.

Feedblitz Test

Posted by admin on February 25, 2008 None comments

Pardon the intrusion. If you missed my earlier post, I’m amidst a blog technology “reset” – moving from Moveable Type to WordPress.

So far, I continue to be impressed by the ease of administration and customization with WordPress compared to MT.

As I continue to transition – I’m amazed at the various plugins, widgets, etc. that I must also update.

Feedblitz came up on my list tonight. I once blogged about moving to Feedblitz from Bloglet way back in the day. I have to admit, as I dug up my Feedblitz login and password, I gave pause considering that I might just skip it and go with Feedburner.

Feedburner is a similar company, recently purchased by Google, that “burns my feed” for me. Feedblitz handles email subscriptions for folks who want to be pinged when there is a new post to the blog.

I could probably just switch to Feedburner for both, but I have to say, going back through the Feedblitz interface – things have been upgraded since I’ve last checked.

The user interface isn’t fantastic, but it does seem to be feature-rich. While they weren’t purchased by Google – it seems like they have a fighting chance at competing. I wonder how it’s going over there.

Also, my subscribers are with Feedblitz – so why make them move (not that there are that many).

At this point I see no compelling reason not to stay loyal for the time being and try out some of the new features – it sure seems like they’ve been working hard over there.

For the email subscribers to Not That You Asked, served through Feedblitz – holler if you get this. Thanks. :)