ArchiveSeptember 2010

It's not illegal to block mail

My post “We’re going to party like it’s 1996” is still getting a lot of comments from people. Based on the comments, either people aren’t reading or my premise wasn’t clear. Back in 1996 the first lawsuits were brought against ISPs to stop ISPs from blocking email. These suits were failures. Since that time, other senders have attempted to sue ISPs and lost...

Guide to resolving ISP issues

I often get a chuckle out of watching some people, who are normally on the blocking end of the delivery equation, struggle through their own blocking issues. A recent situation came up on a mailing list where someone who has very vehement opinions about how to approach her particular blocklist for delisting and that the lists policies are immutable. The company she works for is having some...

Reputation monitoring sites

There are a number of sites online that provide public information about reputation of an IP address or domain name. Sender Score – . Provided by Return Path. They collect data from some ISPs and blocklists. Using a proprietary formula, they calculate a sender score running from 1 – 100 for each IP address sending mail to their network. Higher scores means a better reputation. Can be...

Don't be the tomcat

Our tomcat, Grover, wants to go outside. He wants to go out the side door, so he’s been sitting in front of it, looking at me, then staring at the door. He’s been doing this for about half an hour, intermixed with occasional sad yowling. The back door is open, and he can get from outside the back door to outside the side door in a minute, tops. But he wants to go out the side door...

Abuse Reporting Format

J.D. has a great post digging into ARF, the abuse reporting format used by most feedback loops.
If you’re interested in following along, you might find this annotated example ARF report handy.

Stop SHOUTING

The nice folks at Box of Meat pointed me at an article about SHOUTING in ALL CAPITALS. There’s something about text in all caps that turns people off. Using it in a social context is often seen as yelling. But using it in a design context is often seen as bad read ability. People use text in all caps thinking they are empha­sizing their message. However, what they are actually doing is de...

Content based filtering

A spam filter looks at many things when it’s deciding whether or not to deliver a message to the recipients inbox, usually divided into two broad categories – the behaviour of the sender and the content of the message. When we talk about sender behaviour we’ll often dive headfirst into the technical details of how that’s monitored and tracked – history of mail from...

We're gonna party like it's 1996!

Over on deliverability.com Dela Quist has a long blog post up talking about how changes to Hotmail and Gmail’s priority inbox are a class action suit waiting to happen. All I can say is that it’s all been tried before. Cyberpromotions v. AOL started the ball rolling when they tried to use the First Amendment to force AOL to accept their unsolicited email. The courts said No. Time goes...

Gmail Evolution

All the cool kids are doing infographics, so here’s our take on the new Gmail Priority Inbox.

Recent Posts

Archives

Follow Us