Yahoo sent out an email yesterday evening to their postmaster mailing list saying they believe they have fixed the issue that I mentioned earlier this week. Some of the MXs were erroneously rejecting mail claiming that the sending IPs were on the XBL.
A couple clients recently have had bounces from different places indicating that their mails were caught by the recipients’ anti-virus filter. These are some of my better clients sending out daily newsletters. They’ve been mailing for years and I know that they are not phishing. They asked me to investigate the bounce messages. The information I had to work with was minimal. One...
Twitter and some of the other delivery blogs are all abuzz today talking about the consumer survey released by MAAWG (pdf link, large file) looking at end user knowledge and awareness of email security practices. The survey has a lot of good data and I strongly encourage people to look at the full report. There are a couple of results that are generating most of the buzz, including the fact that...
Al writes about a Yahoo delivery problem where they have identified a particular Yahoo MX that is falsely returning “mail blocked due to XBL.” The IPs in question are not on the XBL. Yahoo is aware of the issue and are working on a resolution. If you are seeing these bounces, Yahoo is aware of the issue. Exacttarget has worked around the issue by suspending deliveries to the affected...
Last week Jon left a comment on my post Following the Script. He gives a familiar story about how he’s having problems contacting Yahoo. It’s funny, I found this thread by searching for alternate means to contact Yahoo FBL. This is because I desperately need to communicate with them and their ‘normal channel’ has been literaly as effective as a shout down a wishing well. […] I’ve...
Over at Spamtacular Mickey talks about the email marketers’ syllogism. Anyone who doesn’t want our mail will opt-out. Most people don’t opt-out. Therefore, most people want our mail. This clearly fallacious reasoning is something I deal with frequently with my clients, particularly those who come to me for reputation repair. They can’t understand why people are calling them spammers...
A fellow delivery specialist sent me a question this morning. What is your opinion on putting CAN SPAM compliance information (postal address, unsubscribe link, etc) in an image? The short answer is this is something spammers do and something that legitimate mailers should never want to do. The longer answer needs to look at why spammers do this, why legitimate marketers may think about doing...
With all the traveling I did last month, I’m still not back to full blogging speed. I have been slowly reading through the backlog of unread posts from my RSS feeds and there was lots of good stuff published. Three myths about DKIM by John Levine. A very good explanation taking down some of the myths of DKIM. Also on the DKIM front, RFC 5585 DKIM Service Overview was published last month...
The US DOJ announced today the guilty plea of David Patton. Patton was charged with “aiding and abetting violations of the CAN SPAM act. Software written by Patton’s company provided the ability to modify email headers and use open proxies to disguise the source of the email. The Ralsky convictions are, to the best of my knowledge, the first criminal prosecution for CAN SPAM...
I mentioned a few weeks ago about a conversation I’d had at MAAWG about transactional email and opened up the conversation to readers here. Mike proposed a definition. [Transactional mail is] an automated message, sent on a per-user basis, usually as the result of a direct action by the user or strongly associated with the user. In Mike’s decision were things like sales receipts, opt...
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