Archive2019

November 9, 2019

ESP being phished is a Black Friday cataclysm

By laura

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09November

There is currently a phishing attack against a major ESP. The mail came through what I presume was a compromised account hosted at one of the providers. It’s just as possible this was a domain set up for the sole purpose of phishing, though. The underlying attack is pretty good. They took the ESP compliance notification email and changed a couple of the links to point to their phishing page...

November 6, 2019

CAN SPAM says I can!

By laura

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06November

Saw a new disclaimer on mail sent to an address harvested off our website today: disclaimer: This is an advertisement and a promotional mail-in adherence to the guidelines of CAN-SPAM act 2003. We have clearly mentioned the source id of this mail, also clearly mentioned the subject line, and they are in no way misleading in any form. We have found your email address through our own efforts on the...

November 5, 2019

Identifying domains that don’t accept or send email

By laura

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05November

A couple folks have asked me recently about MX records that they don’t understand. These records consist of a single . or they contain localhost or they are 127.0.0.1. In all cases, the domain owners use these records to signal that the domains don’t accept email. What do these records look like? Why do domains do this? In all cases it’s because the domain owners want to signal...

October 29, 2019

Mentally modelling filters

By laura

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29October

When we talk about filters, we often think there is one filter. But, in many cases there are multiple stages of filters, each examining mail in a different way. In deliverability terms the easiest filters to ignore are the individual user filters. Mostly because there’s nothing we can do about those. These are the baysean style filters built into a lot of email clients as well as specific...

October 28, 2019

Purging to prevent spamtraps

By laura

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28October

Someone recently asked when they should purge addresses to remove spamtraps. To my mind this is actually the wrong question. Purging addresses that don’t engage is rarely about spamtraps, it’s about your overall communication processes. Well maintained traps will actively bounce mail for 6 – 12 months before turning the address into a trap. In those cases it’s mostly the whole...

October 23, 2019

Microsoft and SmartScreen

By laura

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23October

There was another thread on mailop today about email filtering. This one was about Microsoft and SmartScreen. After watching a bunch of folks make lots of comments about what SmartScreen was, and get it wrong, I waded in. One thing that I always thought was common knowledge, but apparently isn’t, is that SmartScreen is primarily a content filter. Microsoft does use IP and domain reputation...

October 21, 2019

Tulsi v. Google response

By laura

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21October

On Friday Google’s lawyers filed their response to the Gabbard Campaign’s first amended complaint. They asked for the case to be moved to the Northern District of CA as per the contractual agreement that the campaign signed. They also asked for a dismissal as they are not a government entity nor acting in place of a government entity and thus are not covered under either the 1st or...

October 17, 2019

Forget about engagement, think inboxing

By laura

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17October

While answering a question about how to improve IP reputation at Gmail I realized that I no longer treat Gmail opens as anything about how a user is interacting with email. There are so many cases and ways that a pixel load can be triggered, without the user actually caring about the mail that it’s not a measure of the user at all. That doesn’t mean opens are useless. In fact...

October 16, 2019

Opting out of “service” messages

By laura

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16October

A frequent question in a number of deliverability spaces is how to tell if a message is transactional or marketing. In most cases the decision is related to whether or not to respect an unsubscribe request. All too often companies decide that their messages are too important to allow someone to opt-out of. The problem is, in some cases, there is no longer a customer relationship to send notices...

October 14, 2019

Details matter

By laura

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14October

I field a lot of delivery questions on various online fora. Often people try and anonymise what they’re asking about by abstracting out the question. The problem is that there are very few answers we can give in the abstract. What are some examples of these types of questions? Should you always remove an address that hard bounces? Well, in general, yes. But there are a small number of cases...