ArchiveAugust 2018

Changes are coming…

We’ve been blogging here about email for 11 years now. My first post was published August 29, 2007. In that time, we’ve published more than 2300 posts, and written probably millions of words. For years we have blogged multiple times a week. This summer we’ve not kept up our normal posting schedule. We’ve been a little busy with non-email stuff. We’ve spent this...

Check your abuse addresses

Even if you have excellent policies and an effective, empowered enforcement team you can still have technical problems that can cause you to drop abuse mail, and so lose the opportunity to get a bad actor off your network before they damage your reputation further. It’s not quite as simple as “We’re seeing email in our abuse ticketing system, so everything must be fine.”...

Can I get access to Google Postmaster tools if I’m using an ESP?

The answer is almost certainly yes, but there are definitely cases where it the answer is no. If you’re using your own domains for the return path and/or the d= value then you can set up postmaster tools for those domains. If you’re using a domain managed by the ESP, or a subdomain where the ESP manages the DNS, you may need your ESP to publish the correct key in DNS to authenticate...

Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work.

Matthew Green reminded me of an old bit of spam lore. It’s a canned response to someone’s New and Awesome and entirely unoriginal Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem. It originated on the news.admin.net-abuse.email newsgroup, I think, maybe twenty years ago? While one or two details have changed it’s still applicable to most of the current generation of under-researched...

The Problem With Affiliates (2)

On Friday I mentioned spam coming from a BarkBox affiliate programme. The original email is here. It’s not terribly exciting, it’s rather typical spam of the sort sent by professional spammers. It’s validly DKIM and SPF authenticated, and DMARC-aligned. It includes invisible white-on-white padding text so that it doesn’t look like image-only spam to naive filters (using...

The Problem With Affiliates

If I see BarkBox I think Spam. That’s because, despite their marketing team effort, facebook and banner ad budget, the main place I see them advertised is via spam in my mailbox. It’s not even good spam. There’s quite a lot of it. Most of it looks much the same, other than the spammer randomizing colours. This one looks better than the black on cyan version, or any of the other...

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