Many questions about delivery problems often assume that there is one standard email filter and the rules are the same across all of them. Unfortunately, this isn’t really the case. The biggest divide is consumer versus business filters. Business filters don’t really care about things like engagement. A sender could have near perfect engagement with a message to a business. But a...
As I’m writing this, I’m watching Deputy Atty General Rod Rosenstein discuss the indictments of 12 Russian military officers for hacking activities during the 2016 election cycle. One of the methods used to gain access to systems was spearphishing. I think most of us know what phishing is, sending lots of emails to a wide range of people in an attempt to collect some credentials...
I’m back in the office after a busy June. The 2 continent, 3 city tour was unexpectedly extended to a 4th city thus I was out most of last week as well. What was I doing? We spent a week in Dublin, which is an awesome and amazing city and I love it a little bit more every time we visit. After Dublin I jetted off to Chicago, where I spoke at ActiveCampaign’s first user conference. The...
One thing I really like about going to conferences is they’re often one of the few times I get to sit and think about the bigger email picture. Hearing other people talk about their marketing experiences, their email experiences, and their blocking experiences usually triggers big picture style thoughts. Earlier this week I was at Activate18, hosted by Iterable. The sessions I attended were...
The AOL postmaster team posted some information about the upcoming MX transition on their blog. [S]tarting this week, the majority of AOL’s MX records will point to [OATH’s] new combined servers. This should be transparent to any sender as those servers will operate in simple pass-through mode. This means senders with established FBLs will continue to receive them from our AOL mail...
One of those $5.00 words I learned in the lab was gestalt. We were studying fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and, at the time, there were no consistent measurements or numbers that would drive a diagnosis of FAS. Diagnosis was by gestalt – that is by the patient looking like someone who had FAS. It’s a funny word to say, it’s a funny word to hear. But it’s a useful term to...
For a long time it was a known fact that certain ISPs recycled abandoned addresses into spamtraps. There were long discussions by senders about this process and how it happened. Then at a conference a few years ago representatives of ISPs got up and announced that they do not recycle addresses. This led to quite a bit of consternation about how deliverability folks were making things up and were...
Gmail’s approach to filtering; as described by one of the old timers. This person was dealing with network abuse back when I was still slinging DNA around as my job and just reading headers as a hobby. Gmail uses a 10+ year old neural network that analyzes thousands of factors, related to email, IP, and web, integrated with all Google products, and with 99.9%+ accuracy for identifying...
The two most hated words in deliverability. Many people ask general questions about deliverability and most experts, including myself, answer, “It depends.” There are a lot of problems with this answer. The biggest problem is that it’s led to the impression that there are no real answers about deliverability. That because we can’t answer hypothetical questions we are...
Hi Laura, First of all, I’d like to thank you for the amazing blog. It helps me a lot and I have much fun to read it. Now I have a question to the google alias addresses. As you must have known, Google offers alias addresses and you can put any thing between the local part and @gmail.com with a “+” sign What do you think, what should the onlineshops deal with such address for...
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