ArchiveAugust 2015

A brief history of TXT Records

When the Domain Name System was designed thirty years ago the concept behind it was pretty simple. It’s mostly just a distributed database that lets you map hostname / query-type pairs to values. If you want to know the IP address of cnn.com, you look up {cnn.com, A} and get back a couple of IP addresses. If you want to know where to send mail for aol.com users, you look up {aol.com, MX}...

Pattern matching primates

Why do we see faces where there are none? Paradolia Why do we look at random noise and see patterns? Patternicity Why do we think we have discovered what’s causing filtering if we change one thing and email gets through? It’s all because we’re pattern matching primates, or as Michael Shermer puts it “people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe...

Phishing costs company $46 million

Brian Krebs posted about a tech firm that lost $46M dollars due to fraud. The company reported in its SEC filings that the money was lost when someone impersonated an employee and directed the finance department to transfer money to outside accounts. This is becoming more common. In some cases, DMARC authentication may stop this kind of fraud. But DMARC has a lot of deployment challenges and can...

More Yahoo! Challenges

A lot of people are reporting they’re not getting confirmation emails when signing up for the new Y! FBL program. This is causing problems with folks attempting to transfer domains to the new FBL.
Will update when I hear anything.

Continuous Testing

HubSpot recently posted an blog article comparing which was better for engagement, plain text emails or HTML emails. In a survey they sent out in 2014, 64% of the responses said they preferred the HTML and image-based emails. It seems pretty straight forward, recipients say they want HTML emails over text based emails but through their A/B testing, the text versions had a higher open rate. They...

Monitoring Your Mail Stream

One of the most important things for any mail sender to do is monitor their mail stream. There are a number of things that every mailer should pay attention to.  Some are things to monitor during delivery, some are things to monitor after delivery. All of these things tell senders important information about how their mail is being received by their recipients and the ISPs. What to monitor during...

July 2015: The Month in Email

Once again, we reviewed some of the ways brands are trying (or might try) to improve engagement with customers. LinkedIn, who frequently top lists of unwanted-but-legitimate email, announced that they’ll be sending less mail. Josh wrote about giving subscribers options for both the type and frequency of messages, and about setting expectations for new subscribers. In each case, it’s about...

Ongoing Yahoo delays

I’ve been hearing from folks over the last few days that they’re seeing an uptick in deferrals from Yahoo! The deferrals are not uniform. ESPs report they’re seeing some, but not all, customers affected. Other ESPs aren’t seeing any changes. It’s not just you. But it would be very worthwhile to dig into engagement and other stats. It’s possible this is a new...

Are botnets really the spam problem?

Over the last few years I’ve been hearing some people claim that botnets are the real spam problem and that if you can find a sender then they’re not a problem. Much of this is said in the context of hating on Canada for passing a law that requires senders actually get permission before sending email. Botnets are a problem online. They’re a problem in a lot of ways. They can be...

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