I’ll be up in Toronto Tuesday and part of Wednesday for the M3AAWG meeting. If you’re there, say HI!
September 29, 2017
MAAWG next week
29September
September 27, 2017
Warmup advice for Gmail
27September
Getting to the Gmail inbox in concept is simple: send mail people want to receive. For a well established mail program with warm IPs and domains, getting to the inbox in practice is simple. Gmail uses recipient interaction with email to determine if an email is wanted or not. These interactions are easy when mail is delivered to the inbox, even if the user has tabs enabled. When mail is in the...
September 26, 2017
Sometimes less is more
26September
We just bought some new desks, to replace the old ones that date back to the days of CRT monitors. The supplier we bought them from, Autonomous, did a nice set of triggered sends throughout the sales process – “we’ve received your order”, “we’ve shipped your order”, “your order has been delivered”. That’s not rocket science – you...
September 25, 2017
10 things every mailer must do
25September
A bit of a refresh of a post from 2011: Six best practices for every mailer. I still think best practices are primarily technical and that how senders present themselves to recipients is more about messaging and branding than best practices. These 6 best practices from 2011 are no longer best, these days, they’re the absolute minimum practices for senders. If you can’t manage to do...
September 22, 2017
A DMARC warning
22September
One challenge when implementing DMARC is to ensure that all mail, and I do mean ALL mail is authenticated correctly, before switching to a p=reject notice. The easiest way to do this is to set up a p=none record and check reports to see what mail isn’t authenticated. At least some of this mail is actually going to be valid but unauthenticated email. I regularly recommend monitoring for 6...
September 21, 2017
Way to go Equifax
21September
Earlier this month I wrote about how we can’t trust Equifax with our personal data. I’m not sure we can trust them with a cotton ball. Today, we discover Equifax has been sending consumers worried about their personal information leaking to the wrong site. [O]n multiple occasions over the span of weeks, the company’s official Twitter account responded to customer inquiries by...
September 20, 2017
Microsoft changes
20September
There’s been quite a bit of breakage and delivery failure to various Microsoft domains this month. It started with them changing the MX for hotmail.co.uk, then the MX for hotmail.fr… and both these things seem to have broken mail. I also saw a report this morning that some of the new MXs have TLS certificates that don’t match the hostnames. What’s going on? Historically...
September 19, 2017
Thinking about deliverability
19September
I was chatting with folks over on one of the email slack channels today. The discussion was about an ESP not wanting to implement a particular change as it would hurt deliverability. It led me down a path of thinking about how we think of deliverability and how that informs how we approach email. The biggest problem I see is the black and white thinking. There’s an underlying belief in the...
September 18, 2017
About those degrees…
18September
There is a meme going around related to the Equifax hack that points out an executive in charge of security doesn’t have a degree related to security. Surprise! A lot of the folks who currently keep us safe on the internet don’t have degrees in security. They just didn’t exist when we were in school. I think Paul summed it up best: [T]alking about Susan Mauldin’s music degree is...
September 14, 2017
Targeted advertising
14September
A friend posted a link in IRC pointing at a couch at Wayfair.com. Now I have Wayfair.com ads following me around the internet.
ProPublica wrote an article about how Facebook lets advertisers micro target “jew haters” and other hate groups.
I received this postcard in the mail.
Targeted Advertising.
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