Spamcop mail changes

Spamcop is shutting down it’s email service. While anyone could report spam using Spamcop, the system also provided users email addresses behind the Spamcop filters. This shut down should have no major impact on senders. Email addresses in use will still be accepting email, but that mail will simply be forwarded to another address, instead of users being able to access it through POP or IMAP.
The one problem some senders may have is IF they are solely authenticating through SPF and they are publishing a p=reject DMARC statement. This may result in some of the mail being rejected at the forwarding mail server, like AOL, Yahoo and other services respecting DMARC policy statements.
User forwarded mail will be coming from 68.232.142.20 (esa1.spamcop.iphmx.com) and 68.232.142.151 (esa2.spamcop.iphmx.com). If you don’t want to apply DMARC policy to known forwarded mail, those are the IPs to special case.

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June 2014: The month in email

Each month, we like to focus on a core email feature or function and present an overview for people looking to learn more. This month, we addressed authentication with SPF.
We also talked about feedback mechanisms, and the importance for senders to participate in FBL processes.
In our ongoing discussions about spam filters, we took a look at the state of our own inboxes and lamented the challenge spam we get from Spamarrest. We also pointed out a post from Cloudmark where they reiterate much of what we’ve been saying about filters: there’s no secret sauce, just a continuing series of efforts to make sure recipients get only the mail they want and expect to receive. We also looked at a grey area in the realm of wanted and expected mail: role accounts (such as “marketing@companyname.com”) and how ESPs handle them.
As always, getting into the Gmail inbox is a big priority for our clients and other senders. We talked a bit about this here, and a bit more about the ever-changing world of filters here.
On the subject of list management, we wrote about the state of affiliate mailers and the heightened delivery challenges they face getting in the inbox. We got our usual quota of spam, and a call from a marketer who had purchased our names on a list. You can imagine how effective that was for them.
And in a not-at-all-surprising development, spammers have started to employ DMARC workarounds. We highlighted some of the Yahoo-specific issues in a post that raises more questions.
We also saw some things we quite liked in June. In the Best Practices Hall of Fame, we gave props to this privacy policy change notification and to our bank’s ATM receipts.
We also reviewed some interesting new and updated technology in the commercial MTA space, and were happy to share those findings.

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April: The month in email

April was a big month of changes in the email world, and here at Word to the Wise as we launched our new site, blog and logo.
DMARC
The big story this month has been DMARC, which started with a policy change Yahoo made on April 4 updating their DMARC policy from “report” to “reject”. We began our coverage with a brief DMARC primer to explain the basics around these policy statements and why senders are moving in this direction. We shared some example bounces due to Yahoo’s p=reject, and talked about how to fix discussion lists to work with the new Yahoo policy. We gathered some pointers to other articles worth reading on the Yahoo DMARC situation, and suggested some options for dealing with DMARC for mail intermediaries. Yahoo issued a statement about this on April 11th, explaining that it had been highly effective in reducing spoofed email. We also noted a great writeup on the situation from Christine at ReturnPath. On April 22nd, AOL also announced a DMARC p=reject record.  We talked a bit about who might be next (Gmail?) and discussed how Comcast chose to implement DMARC policies, using p=reject not for user email, but only for the domains they use to communicate directly with customers. We expect to see more discussion and policy changes over the next few weeks, so stay tuned.
Spamtraps
We wrote three posts in our continuing discussion about spamtraps. The first was in response to a webinar from the DMA and EEC, where we talked about how different kinds of traps are used in different ways, and, again, how spamtraps are just a symptom of a larger problem. Following that, we wrote more about some ongoing debate on traps as we continued to point out that each trap represents a lost opportunity for marketers to connect with customers, which is really where we hope email program managers will focus. And finally, we tried to put some myths about typo traps to rest. As I mentioned in that last post, I feel like I’m repeating myself over and over again, but I want to make sure that people get good information about how these tools are used and misused.
Security
We started the month by saying “Security has to become a bigger priority for companies” and indeed, the internet continued to see security breaches in April, including the very serious Heartbleed vulnerability in SSL. In the email world, AOL experienced a compromise, which contributed to some of the DMARC policy changes we discussed above. In a followup post, we talked about how these breaches appear to be escalating. Again, we expect to hear more about this in the next weeks and months.
Best Practices
Ending on a positive note, we had a few posts about best practices and some email basics. We started with a pointer to Al Iverson’s post on masking whois info and why not to do it. Steve wrote up a comprehensive post with everything you ever wanted to know about the From header and RFC5322. I talked about how companies ignore opt-outs, and why they shouldn’t. I shared a really good example of a third-party email message, and also talked about message volume. And finally, we talked about how and why we warm up IP addresses.
Let us know if there’s anything you’d like to hear more about in May!

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ReturnPath on DMARC+Yahoo

Over at ReturnPath Christine has an excellent non-technical summary of the DMARC+Yahoo situation, along with some solid recommendations for what actions you might take to avoid the operational problems it can cause.

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