ArchiveJune 2011

Gmail shows authentication data to the recipient

Yesterday Gmail rolled out some changes to their interface. One of the changes is that they are now showing end users authentication results in the user screen. It’s really the next step in email authentication, showing the results to the end user. So how does Google do this? Google is checking both SPF and DKIM. If mail is authenticated and the authentication matches the from address then...

URL Shortening and Email

Any time you put a URL in mail you send out, you’re sharing the reputation of everyone who uses URLs with that hostname. So if other people send unwanted email that has the same URL in it that can cause your mail to be blocked or sent to the bulk folder. That has a bunch of implications. If you run an affiliate programme where your affiliates use your URLs then spam sent by your affiliates...

Bit.ly gets you Blocked

URL shorteners, like bit.ly, moby.to and tinyurl.com, do three things: Make a URL shorter Track clicks on the URL Hide the destination URL Making URLs shorter was their original role, and it’s why they’re so common in media where the raw URL is visible to the recipient – instant messaging, twitter and other microblogs, and in plain text email where the “real” URL...

Well designed email program

I so often talk about the failures of various email marketing programs that it’s only fair I mention when someone gets it right. We spent the past week with family on the east coast. Our flight back to the west coast was very, very early Sunday morning so I booked a night at the airport hotel. That way we could just stumble to the shuttle at some horrible hour and not worry about trying to...

The frequency conundrum

What is the perfect frequency to send mail? Is it daily, weekly, monthly, hourly, minutely (is that even a word?) or randomly? Any number of experts will give you a definitive answer to this question, but I don’t believe there is a single answer. The frequency recipients will respond to depends on the type of mail, the recipient expectations, the sender and a host of other factors. For one...

Smart email

This week I received an email from a vendor we purchased software from 6 months ago. And it was exactly 6 months to the day of our original purchase I received an email basically reminding me of what I purchased and asking me to update my contact information. Thank you for using Atlassian software and we hope it has been of continuing benefit to your organisation! We wanted to take a moment to...

The Real Story

We’ve heard this story before. Someone gives an email address to a company. That company sends them email via an ESP for several years. Hackers break in to the ESP and steal a bunch of email addresses. The original address owner starts getting targeted and random spam to that email address. The reality is rarely quite that simple. Here’s my version of this story. The names have been...

MAAWG: Just keeps getting better

Last week was the 22nd meeting of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG). While I am prohibited from talking about specifics because of the closed door nature of the group, I can say I came out of the conference exhausted (as usual) and energized (perhaps not as usual). The folks at MAAWG work hard and play even harder. I came away from the conference feeling more optimistic about email...

e360 and the appeals court

Oral arguments in Spamhaus’ appeal were held last week. Mickey blogged about it on Thursday. I heard from him and a bunch of the Spamhaus folks about it at MAAWG, but was busy enough that I didn’t get a chance to listen to it. Mickey is not exaggerating on how badly the judges, particularly Judge Posner, beat up on e360’s lawyer. More quotes are available at Appeals judges...

New blocklisting process

There is a new type of blocking designed to interrupt the ability of users to click and visit phishing sites. DNS Response Policy Zones allows companies running recursive resolvers to create a zone that will not resolve specific domains. This is a second layer of filtering, if a spammer manages to get an email with a malicious link into the inbox then the ISP can still protect the user from...

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