Do we really care whether our SPF email authentication is aligned?
3 days ago
Do we care about SPF alignment?
22November
5 days ago
Comparing DKIM keys
20November
Sometimes we have a client who has done something wrong when setting up authentication. Their DKIM signing fails due to something being wrong with the public key they’ve published. The published key looks fine, by eye. It’s got all the fields it should have, but diagnostic tools give inscrutable error messages. If you’re lucky, “This doesn’t seem to be a valid RSA...
4 weeks ago
The Future of Deliverability
30October
There always seems to be appetite from folks to read the tea leaves and follow up with predictions about what the future holds. I mean, how many folks in the US are obsessively refreshing polls for the last few weeks? (American’s: don’t forget to vote on Tuesday!) The reality is, though, we don’t know what the future holds and we can’t always make predictions. I’ve...
3 months ago
No, Gmail did not just break all open tracking
29August
I was avoiding commenting on the email open tracking bad take that seems to be going viral round the more gullible corners of LinkedIn.
I avoided it for long enough that other folks wrote articles saying pretty much what I’d say. Yay!
You should read what Al has to say over at SpamResource.
3 months ago
DNS Failures
28August
We use DNS a lot in email, particularly for authentication, so diagnosing why DNS isn’t returning what we expect it to is a pretty common challenge. And DNS responses aren’t exactly the clearest thing to understand. There are two types of DNS server we need to know about. When we publish DNS records for our own domain we add them to a nameserver that is authoritative for our domain...
3 months ago
The Economics of Cold Outreach
12August
It’s time we talk about cold outreach mail. In the last 2 years the volume and aggressiveness of cold outreach mail seems to have exploded. There are dozens of companies out there who are selling services to companies to facilitate cold outreach. My own sales mailbox is full of requests from companies to help them solve their delivery problems. So let’s talk about cold outreach...
4 months ago
Bears and Spam Filters
09August
Why is designing spam filters like designing bear-proof trash cans?
4 months ago
Prefetches and Proxies
06August
Jody asks “Are ‘prefetch opens’ and ‘proxy opens’ the same thing?” Non-human opens An “open” is just someone (or something) fetching a remote image. A non-human-interaction (NHI) open is where some sort of automation fetches the image without human interaction – i.e. it’s fetched when the automation feels like it, not triggered by a user...
4 months ago
Sendy and one-click unsubscribe
13July
If you’re using sendy and you’ve found that RFC 8058 one click unsubscribe fails – or, worse, seems to work but doesn’t actually unsubscribe the user – you should take a look at James’ workaround.
5 months ago
Sending domains and hostnames
12July
Lots of times I see someone asking a question and they talk about their sending domain. And it’s sometimes not 100% clear which domain they mean by that – and when we’re talking about alignment and reputation it can make a difference. So here’s a list of (some of?) the different places a mailserver uses a domain. Hostnames Machine Hostname: What the operating system...
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