ArchiveMarch 2016

The Internet is hard.

There are so many things that need to happen to make the Internet work. DNS entries need to be right. MXs need to be set up. Web servers need to be configured. And, let’s be honest, anyone who has ever run their own services on the Internet has flubbed a configuration. We don’t think about it, because most of the time the configurations are handled by scripts and they do things right...

The 10 worst …

Spamhaus gave a bunch of us a preview of their new “Top 10 worst” (or should that be bottom 10?) lists at M3AAWG. These lists have now been released to the public. The categories they’re measuring are: Countries Spam ISPs Spammers Botnet Countries Botnet ISPs Botnet ASNs TLDs Nothing really surprising there, but it’s nice to see the numbers. I have to wonder if the listing...

SPF: The rule of ten

Some mechanisms and modifiers (collectively, “terms”) cause DNS queries at the time of evaluation, and some do not. The following terms cause DNS queries: the “include”, “a”, “mx”, “ptr”, and “exists” mechanisms, and the “redirect” modifier. SPF implementations MUST limit the total number of those terms to 10...

Ask Laura: Does changing ESPs hurt deliverability?

  Dear Laura, We’re a small ESP and as we onboard new clients, we often hear them ask “Why did I get better open rates with our previous provider? There has to be something wrong with your platform!” As part of the onboarding process, we meet with new clients to provide best practices and let them know they are building a reputation with ISPs on new IPs. We talk about how algorithms are...

Mutt: Mailbox power tool

“All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.” Mutt is a commandline mail client that’s been in use and been actively developed for about two decades. It’s considered by many to be the most powerful mail client available, particularly for handling large volumes of email. It’s weaknesses include poor rich text handling and desktop integration for attachment...

Things to read: March 9, 2016

It’s sometimes hard for me to keep up with what other people are saying and discussing about email marketing. I’ve been trying to be more active on LinkedIn, but there are just so many good marketing and delivery blogs out there I can’t keep up with all of them. Here are a couple interesting things I’ve read in the last week. Five Steps to Stay Out of the Spam Folder...

Best practices or required practices

What really are the best practices for email? A year ago I wrote a post about best practices and how most of my best practices were different from what other people recommend. I don’t talk about rules for frequency or subject line length. I don’t focus on best practices for bounce processing or content length. My best practice recommendations are really about process. Send only opt-in...

65.0.0.0/8 DNS issues

If you’re sending email from any address beginning with a 65 – in 65.0.0.0/8 – it’s possible you’ll see some delivery problems.
Something appears to be broken with dnssec signatures for the reverse DNS zone, leading queries for reverse DNS to fail for anyone using a dnssec aware DNS resolver (which is almost everyone).

Ray Tomlinson

Ray Tomlinson has passed away. Mainstream obituaries are going to focus on his being “the creator of email” or “the sender of the first email” or “the inventor of the @ sign in email addresses“. All of which are true. He did send the first (networked) email. He did use the (otherwise mostly unused on TENEX) @ sign to separate user and host. But he did a lot of...

Fraud, terms of service and email marketing

Here at the Atkins house we’re still both recovering from the M3AAWG plague. I don’t know what it was that we shared during the conference, but it’s knocked many folks over. I don’t have a lot to blog about this afternoon so I was looking through some of my old blog posts to get at least some content up before I give up for the weekend. I found an old post about permission...

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