ArchiveJanuary 2012

DKIM deployment challenges

Cloudmark has an interesting blog post pointing out some of the challenges of signing mail with DKIM in a large company with a diverse mail system.

DMARC: an authentication framework

A new email industry group was announced this morning. DMARC is a group of industry participants, including large senders, large receivers and relevant intermediaries working on a framework to reduce the harm from phishing. DMARC is working on a standard to allow senders to publish sending policies and receivers to act on those policies. Currently, senders who want receivers to not deliver...

Costs and accounting for email

The decision by Cheetahmail to stop allowing customers to use email append caused a very long discussion on some of the marketing lists.  One of the criticisms had to do with what a dumb “business decision” Cheetah was making. I disagree. Appending, and other non-permission based sending cause a lot of costs to trickle down on the ESP. Many of the large ESPs have teams of 8 or 10...

IP Address reputation primer

There has been a lot of recent discussion and questions about reputation, content and delivery. I started to answer some of them, and then realized there weren’t any basic reference documents I could refer to when explaining the interaction. So I decided to write some. This first post is about IP address reputation with some background on why IPs are so important and why ISPs focus so...

Can you verify email addresses in real time?

In a recent discussion about spamtraps and address lists and data collection a participant commented, “[E]very site should be utilizing a real-time email address hygiene and correction service on the front end.” He went on to explain that real time hygiene prevents undeliverable addresses and spamtraps and all sorts of list problems. I was skeptical to say the least. Yes, there are...

Information sharing and the Internet

Many years ago I was working at the UW-Madison. Madison is a great town, I loved it a lot. One of the good bits was this local satire paper called The Onion. This paper would show up around campus on Wednesdays. Our lab, like many university employees and students, looked forward to Wednesday and the new humor The Onion would bring to us. At the same time, I was internet friends with an employee...

Delivery and marketing, another view

In addition to posting some of my thoughts about how delivery and marketing have different and possible contradictory constraints, I asked folks on the Only Influencers list what they thought. They had some different perspectives, primarily being marketers. One person even welcomed me to the dark side. The general response from the marketing side of things appeared to be that ISPs need to stop...

Cheetahmail on appending

Experian CheetahMail believes that opt-out email appending is no longer an acceptable practice, and that marketers should no longer use of this practice to acquire customer email addresses. EmailResponsibly In my experience, appending causes major delivery problems. Of course, every time the issue comes up some marketer tells us who think it’s a bad idea that they successfully used...

The internet protests SOPA / PIPA

For those who don’t know, a number of major websites will be going offline tomorrow to protest SOPA and PIPA, including wordpress, reddit, Wikipedia and the cheezeburger sites. Tomorrow may be the most productive day ever on the modern internet. Google will also be linking to information about SOPA tomorrow. I had some people ask me about the bills today and have been looking for...

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