We run top-level DNS servers for several blacklists including the CBL, the blacklist of infected machines that the SpamHaus XBL is based on. We don’t run the CBL blacklist itself (so we aren’t the right people to contact about a CBL listing) we just run some of the DNS servers – but that means that we do get to see how many different ways people mess up their spam filter...
Whenever we’re working with someone to diagnose some obscure delivery issue one of the things we usually have them try is to “run a transaction by hand”. Being able to do that is a trick that everyone working with email should be able to do. I was drafting a blog post today and wanted to refer to running a transaction by hand and I realized that we hadn’t actually...
We had a catastrophic failure of our mail server over the weekend. We lost both drives and the server won’t boot past the BIOS stage. Most of the weekend was spent on recovery and restoration, and we expect to have mail restored today. In the meantime, if you need to get a hold of me I’m available on AIM as wttwlaura and can be reached at my gmail account: wttwlaura. This does mean I...
The last of seven in our occasional series on why ESPs need, or don’t need, lots of IP addresses to send mail properly. I need multiple IP addresses in different locations so as to provide redundancy against blacklisting of my ISP Why this is right If you think that your email is likely to be blocked due to the reputation of your ISP then having a backup ISP makes some operational sense. Why this...
As often happens during MAAWG, email companies are announcing new products. One of the interesting ones is the new Domain Assurance product from Return Path. Domain Assurance […] first audit[s] a company’s email streams to be sure authentication has been properly implemented. Then, the company’s domains are added to a registry. Participating ISPs can check the registry and block...
Steve and I were talking this afternoon about HTML in email. He wanted to know what headers I looked for in the HTML portion of an email. A good question, as I’ve seen everything from a full doctype declaration through to just <body> tags.. All of them seem to render OK in various mail clients so I don’t spend too much time worrying about the specific HTML header elements. I do...
Al has a post asking what people would do if their information was shared after opting out of any sharing. It’s a tough call and one I think about as I see mail coming to my mailbox to such addresses as laura-sony and laura-quicken and laura-datran. All of these were addresses given to specific companies and where I attempted to opt-out of them sharing my data with other companies...
Senders with delivery problems ask about “the rules.” “Just tell us what the rules are!” “If the ISPs would just tell us what to do we’d do it!” There is only one rule anyone needs to pay attention to for good mail delivery: Respect the recipient. Not good enough for you? Want more specific rules? OK. The two rules everyone must follow for good mail...
I’ve been recently dealing with a client who is looking at implementing authentication on their domains. He’s done a lot of background research into the schemes and has a relatively firm grasp on the issue. At this point we’re working out what policies he wants to set and how to correctly implement those policies. His questions were well informed for the most part. A few of them...
Delivery Monitor by Aweber is one of the inbox monitoring services available for senders. Aweber has been in the process of winding down Delivery Monitor for the last few months and they will be turning the service off completely tomorrow. A lot of folks have asked me about replacements for Delivery Monitor. There are, of course, Return Path and Pivotal Veracity, but many of the smaller mailers I...
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