New Delivery tools

A couple nifty new delivery tools were published over the weekend.
Mickey published Bounce P.I. where senders can paste in an error message or bounce and it will tell you what filter generated it. If the rejection is unrecognized, it will flag the message internally and it will be researched to see if the filter can be identified.
Steve has a new tool at the DKIMCore site. The key generating tool and the record checking tool have been up for a while. This weekend, though, he published a tool to check the validity the DKIM record published in DNS. Tool output shows if the record is valid, the version and the public key.

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AOL converting all FBLs to ARF

AOL announced today that they are phasing out non-ARF feedback loops. As of September 2, 2008, no new non-ARF feedback loops will be created and all existing non-ARF feedback loops will be converted to ARF.
What is ARF?
ARF stands for Abuse Reporting Format. It is a standardized format intended to make processing of automated abuse reports (or feedback loop reports) easier. Word to the Wise has published tools to help recipients process ARF formatted reports and help developers create tools to handle ARF formatted reports. Abacus also supports ARF format out of the box.

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Who is Julia and why won't she leave me alone?

There seems to be some new spam software in use. Julia <random last name> keeps telling me about her new webcam, how much she wants to date me and wants to know when I want to visit. These spams started February 1. I’ve had 179 caught by my MUA filters, and 152 caught by spamassassin (SA score >7 are filtered to a special account).
This is exactly the type of pattern that causes people to write filters that years later people look at and ask why someone thought this was a reasonable marker for spam.
The good folks over at MailChimp have examined some of the scoring rules that their clients trigger. They found some “Julia” type markers. Some oddities they reported on:

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Links for 7/8/9

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. According to Cisco, DKIM adoption is climbing. More information about DKIM is available at dkim.org and our own dkimcore.org.
The always awesome guys at Mailchimp have embraced twitter as part of their platform. Not only have they  set up their own service for link shortening so that links can be tweeted, but have also incorporated twitter stats into their mail dashboard.
Al has an insightful post on delivery, spam filtering vendors and the differences (or lack thereof) between B2C and B2B marketing. As I tell my customers, there is no switch inside the filtering scheme for “I know this person, they’re OK, let the mail in.”
Terry Zink has started a series about blacklists triggered by the recent SORBS announcement.  His first post, My take on blacklists, part 2, discusses how some people go about building a blocklist from scratch.
Happy 7-8-9 everyone.

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