email Archive

Last week bankrupt book seller Borders announced that they had agreed to sell their intellectual property to rival Barnes & Noble. The big part of the sale of the intellectual property is the Borders email list. No terms of the sale were disclosed but the email list alone contains the contact information for 48 million customers.

Tiffany Kary at Businessweek notes that Barnes & Noble will run an ad campaign in newspapers to alert customers that they have until October 15, 2011 to opt-out — otherwise their contact information (even if you selected not to share the info) will be transferred to Barnes & Noble.

Today Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch began emailing customers to let them know of the intellectual property and customer data sale from Borders. The email, which I’ve partially included below, notes that you have until October 15, 2011 to opt-out from the data transfer.

If you want to opt-out of the data transfer, visit this site, ignore the sales pitches and make sure to click the confirmation link. For some reason, B&N feels it necessary to send you an email to confirm that you want to actually be unsubscribed and opt-out from the data transfer.

Based on the marketing messages in both the email and on their opt-out site, I am assuming you will get a bunch of emails once the data transfer takes place.

Continue reading “Bankrupt Borders Sells Your Customer Data to Barnes & Noble (Opt-Out Offered)” »

It seems that Yahoo Mail is currently down and/or not functioning properly. I haven’t been able to get into my account for about 15 minutes as of the time of this post. The issues appear to have started about 30 minutes ago. Yahoo is flat in early morning trading.

There are lots of people on Twitter who have also had issues accessing the mail service.

Update 11:05AM – I am also now seeing the following error message: internal error – server connection terminated

Some of the time I attempt to load Yahoo Mail, I receive the following error message, while other times, it is just a simple “Connection Timed Out” message.

We’re experiencing some technical difficulties…

We’re sorry, but Yahoo! Mail can’t load due to a temporary error. You can try back again shortly, or visit our help pages for ways to troubleshoot the issue.

Try again
Visit Help for troubleshooting instructions

Temporary error: 14

As always, please report in if Yahoo Mail is down for you – include your location as well.

I remember back in the late 1990s and early 2000s — we sent millions of emails every week and used an outsourced provider to handle sending the email. Back then there were no API email services and we paid an arm and a leg to the email providers to handle the sending and whitelisting of our customer emails. Today there are a number of companies in the email API space.

Today I received a note from Amazon Web Services that they have launched a new email service called Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES). Amazon notes, “(Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers. Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service.”

Basically the Amazon Simple Email Service is an API that developers can call to send emails. Pricing for SES is $0.10 per thousand emails sent. It appears there is even a simple whitelisting function which will process the email messages to make sure they will pass the filters on the recipient side. Amazon also provides email stats including bounced message rates, spam complaints, etc.

Amazon SES ties in to other Amazon Web Services including EC2 and the new (jack and the) beanstalk products. The service is in beta and you can signup here.

The U.S. Postal Service posted a $8.5 billion dollar loss for the fiscal year 2010 which ended last September. There’s talk about eliminating mail delivery on Saturday (a move I support even if the economy was stronger). Post offices are closing all the time. This post isn’t about the quality of the workers we interact with when we buy stamps, mail packages or deal with our mail carriers or station agents. This post is about how, with very little effort, the U.S. Postal Service can create a new revenue stream which could be significant if executed properly.

I’ve had a Post Office Box since I was a teenager. I’ve had boxes in the largest post offices in the world and also at some of the smallest while I was an undergrad. The biggest issue with a post office box is knowing when you have mail to be collected. If you have a post office box, how many times have you walked, drove, traveled to the post office only to find an empty box. What if there was a way to know you had mail to be collected each day before you made the trip to the post office. How much fuel (and time) could we collectively save if we never traveled to the post office when we knew there was nothing waiting for us in our post office boxes?

I’d like to see the U.S. Postal Service offer a paid option for post office box holders to allow us to receive an email or text/sms message when we new mail has been delivered for that day. I’ve recently learned that the UPS Store offers this service for their box holders for $10/month. Whenever you receive a package or letter, the UPS Store sends an email to let you know something has been received. Their emails include tracking numbers and some other details where applicable. I am not even suggesting that the U.S. Postal Service offer something as detailed as the UPS Store.

Continue reading “Here’s How the U.S. Postal Service Can Increase Revenue By Millions of Dollars With No Real Effort” »

It seems platform funds are launching all over the place these days. Three years ago (boy it seems like yesterday) Facebook launched their fbFund. Most recently communications platform Twilio announced a $250,000 Twilio Fund for startups that build upon their platform. Last month Dave McClure’s 500Startups launched the CrowdFlower $250,000 CrowdFlower microfund.

Email platform provider MailChimp has announced the launch of their “integration fund” today. The fund will offer a total of $1 million to startups who build applications on top of the MailChimp platform. Unlike most of the other platform funds, MailChimp says they won’t take any equity. For example, both the CrowdFlower and Twilio funds take 1% equity for an up-to $10,000 investment. There is no mention on the MailChimp fund overview regarding the maximum amount each startup can receive.

The announcement blog post is well worth a read even if you aren’t going to participate in the fund.  MailChimp co-founder and CEO Ben Chestnut discusses how MailChimp grew and why they want to help other companies build towards their own growth. Ben notes that the best marketing vehicle for MailChimp was (and is) the launch of their API. He suggests you build one for your startup and then leverage other APIs for growth. I’ve often said that leveraging others technology is smart — the mistake is building solely upon another companies technology.

If you are interested in obtaining some of the funds, you can complete the application here.

I am a happy Yahoo Mail user. I’ve been a Yahoo Mail user since the early days. I also know that I am a bad tech blogger and early adopter because I don’t use (and make love to) Gmail. I regularly get noogies at tech conferences when others learn about my choice.

Lately I’ve noticed issues with email delivery to my Yahoo Mail account. Sometimes emails are delivered on time, but many are delivered late. And the delayed delivery seems to vary – I can’t put my finger on it. Even the exact same email can be delivered in real-time on one test but another test takes half a day to arrive.  At first I thought it was only emails coming from Rackspace servers as they noted there was an issue a couple of weeks ago with mail delivery. But this past week, the delayed email delivery seems to be coming from all sides.

One interesting note – mail that gets forwarded from my gMail account always seems to come immediately. The same message sent directly to my Yahoo Mail account sometimes is delayed.

Yesterday it caused an issue as newer emails showed up before the previous emails which made for a very odd exchange with a client.

Do you use Yahoo Mail? If so, have you noticed any delivery delays over the past few weeks?

NY-based file sharing service Drop.io has announced a new partnership with Yahoo today. The partnership brings a new application named “Attach Large Files” directly as part of the applications menu within Yahoo Mail.

When you want to attach a file up to 100mb to a Yahoo email, the Attach Large File app creates a drop.io share, uploads the file to it, and attaches a link to the drop.io share inside of the email. In my testing, the application worked well.

The drop.io team notes that the app was built on top of the drop.io API. The app is a default and is available directly in the “applications” menu inside of Yahoo Mail. While I don’t see using the service for uploading a simple image or Word doc, for larger videos or photos it could work very well. And the offering should provide more visibility for drop.io to a mainstream audience.

Here’s a video overview of how the Attach Large Files application works:
Continue reading “Drop.io Launches “Attach Large Files” on Yahoo Mail” »