ArchiveMay 2010

How to disable a domain

Sometimes you might want to make it clear that a domain isn’t valid for email. Perhaps it’s a domain or subdomain that’s just used for infrastructure, perhaps it’s a brand-specific domain you’re only using for a website. Or perhaps you’re a target for phishing and you’ve acquired some lookalike domains, either pre-emptively or after enforcement action...

Confirming spam reports

Someone floated the idea of having ISPs confirm that a user really wants to report a mail as spam every time they do so. The original poster was asking for comments and what we thought of such an idea. The only thing I could think of is the poor woman who’s been gone for a week on vacation and is selecting large swathes of her mailbox and hitting “this is spam.” She then gets...

The importance of data hygiene

Over the weekend, one of the major ISPs purged a lot of abandoned accounts from their system. This has resulted in a massive increase in 550 user unknown bounces at that ISP. This ISP is one of those that uses bounces to feed into their reputation system and the purge may cause otherwise good senders to be blocked temporarily. Talking to clients and other industry folks, it looks like the...

Spamtraps

There is a lot of mythology surrounding spamtraps, what they are, what they mean, how they’re used and how they get on lists. Spamtraps are very simply unused addresses that receive spam. They come from a number of places, but the most common spamtraps can be classified in a few ways. Addresses that used to belong to someone and subsequently abandoned. This is where a lot of spamtraps at...

Email lost a valuable voice

In very sad news ClickZ announced today that Stefan Pollard, email marketer at Responsys and writer for ClickZ passed away recently. Stefan and I interacted over the years but we never had the opportunity to meet in person. His articles on email and delivery were always on my must read list. While I didn’t agree with everything he wrote, I always appreciated his writing and his point of...

Delivery problems are not all spam related

Not every delivery failure is due to poor reputation or spam. Sometimes ISPs just have problems on their mailservers and so mail doesn’t get through. It’s often hard for delivery experts (and their bosses and their customers and their clients) to watch email delays or rejections without being able to do anything about it. Sometimes, though, there is nothing to do. The rejections are...

Public reputation data

IP based reputation is a measure of the quality of the mail coming from a particular IP address. Because of how reputation data is collected and evaluated it is difficult for third parties to provide a reputation score for a particular IP address. The data has to be collected in real time, or as close to real time as possible. Reputation is also very specific to the source of the data. I have...

Why offer a feedback loop?

Someone asked yesterday What business advantage is there to an ISP in offering a feedback loop? I’ve never really seen one. It’s a good question. There’s a fair bit of work involved in offering, maintaining and supporting a feedback loop. What makes it worth it? At a consumer ISP there’s some email sent to customers that’s easy for spam filters to recognize and...

Gmail rendering problem workaround

Gmail recently changed some of the rendering of emails on their website, breaking a lot of email layouts in the process.
Numerous places have published workarounds including
The Email Guide and Return Path.

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