Filtering secret sauce

It seems one of the most asked questions I hear from people is about filters and what the secret sauce is.

Cloudmark’s processes which determine which IPs get a poor or suspect reputation in our CSI products, take into account many different factors, including both spam trap hits and volume of trusted end user complaints (hitting the “This is spam” button), reputation of the reverse DNS of the IP, reputation of the IP block that the IP is part of, and traffic volumes over time which help measure likely use of the IP in a snowshoe attack.
ISPs primarily want their email infrastructure to stay available and performing well, and for email recipients to receive the email that they want to receive. But if as a sender or marketer your email is going to spamtraps or people are hitting the “This is spam” button, then it’s not going to people who want it. Email blacklists and Cloudmark’s Sender Intelligence

Cloudmark is saying all the things deliverability experts tell senders. Maybe hearing it direct from the source will make the message stick better.

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SMTP Level Rejections

While discussing a draft of a Deliverability BCP document the issue came up of what rejections at different phases of the email delivery transaction can mean. That’s quite a big subject, but here’s a quick cheat sheet.
At initial connection
Dropped or failed connection:

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Cloudmark posted their Global Spam Threat Report for 2013.

Cloudmark Annual Global Messaging Threat Report. Nothing too surprising here, but useful for anyone in the email space to check out.

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Censoring email

It seems some mail to Apple’s iCloud has been caught in filters. Apparently, a few months ago someone sent a script to a iCloud user that contained the phrase “barely legal teen” and Apple’s filters ate it.
The amount of hysteria that I’ve seen in some places about this, though, seems excessive. One of my favorite quotes was from MacWorld and just tells me that many of the people reporting on filtering have no idea how filters really work.

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