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Caching vs. Tracking: Meaning and measurement of open rates in e-mail marketing

For most marketers, open rate is one of the most important metrics. But why is this the case? And how is open rate mesured? Are high deviations between the different ISPs (e.g. Yahoo, Hotmail) a reason to worry?

In December 2013, GMail announced an interesting update: Image Caching was introduced. Per default, images should be displayed (instead of suppressed as before). For security reasons, images should be scanned for malware , therefore caching was a necessary measure to be taken.

A tracking pixel is a transparent image of 1×1 pixel size. With it’s help, openings and META-data like geo-location can be tracked.

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How delivery rates are calculated – and why there’s no simple answer

We could talk about Deliverability as everyone, we choose to talk about it as no one.

Today, more than 60% of the whole email traffic is spam (statistica, 2016). This means ISPs have more chance to receive a spam attack, or a risk to his customer, than an important emailing.

Your ISP can proudly show it has a 99% Deliverability rate, nevertheless evidently you receive your emails in the junk folder, or you are blocked to a specific ISP. How can this be? Why is my Deliverability so high on some ISPs and not on all ISPs? Why do I have 99% Deliverability rate but the ISPs still consider me as a spammer? The indicators are just not calculated the same way…

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Spamtraps

There have been many articles and myths circulated about Spamtraps and honeypots. Are they following URLs in E-mails or can you identify them by suppressing the inactive ones? What exactly is their purpose? What can you do if you have identified spamtraps in your list and how can you get rid of them?

There are various types of Spamtraps testing different kinds of (bad) behaviour and therefore acting differently. Main types are pristine (only created for the purpose of being a spamtrap) and recycled (those have been an existing address before).

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How to recognize Spam & Phishing?

You’ve got mail – that’s good. But who was sending you? And is the person, you receive mail from is really the person he pretends to be? And if he was, has the content been changed during transmission? There’s so many Phishing warnings out there and we are not secure anymore, right?

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Security & Encryption for Mass Messaging

Since the Heartbleed and Snowden case there has been a lot of discussion regarding data encryption and security – specifically in regards to email. Many questions such as ‘what options are there to protect data?’, ‘how safe are these options’ and ‘what factors should I watch out for?’ are continuously brought up. We help to clear up these topics below.

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Beginners Guide

Lesson 1, the history of email

Lesson 1, the history of email

Electronic mail, commonly referred to as email or e-mail since 1993, is the method of exchanging messages from a sender to the receiver on a network, generally the internet.

The first email was sent in 1971 by a man called Raymond Tomlinson over the ARPANET. He implemented the first email system that sent an electronic message from one computer to another, in doing so he also coined the ‘@’ symbol to seperate the user name from the senders domain, which has been used ever since.

The ARPANET is famous for securely transferring protected military files between networks. As the ARPANET expanded from 4 research labs to several others, different models of computers were connected, thus creating compatability issues.
The solution was a set of protocols now referred to as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) this was designed in 1982.

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Raymond Tomlinson was also deeply involved in services needed to send emails over networks, these services included;
Mail Transport Agent (MTA) to move emails between machines, setting a standard format for email messages and designing a tool for creating and reading messages.