ArchiveApril 2016

What a week!

Yesterday, after 5pm, I was so happy. I was telling folks to have a great weekend. To take time off and relax. Have fun! Don’t work! Enjoy the weather! Then someone pointed out it was only Thursday. But! I got up this morning and got lots of happy Facebook notifications from friends about how TODAY was Friday. I was ready to have an awesome and productive day and go into the weekend with a...

A DKIM primer resurrected

I was looking for some references today back in old blog posts. This means I discover some old links are dead, blog posts are gone or moved, and information is lost. In this case it’s a post by J.D. Falk on deliverability.com. The link is dead (it looks like the whole website is dead), but I found a copy of his post and am reproducing it here. I don’t have permission, because I...

Podbox Expert Interview Series

Last month I did an interview with Podbox about email, deliverability and how I became an email expert (breaking things, lots of breaking things… and having to pick up the pieces and fix them…) Check out the interview over on their website. I’ve been thinking a lot about history and longevity. Next year will mark 10 years of the Word to the Wise blog and 20 years of me entering...

My panels from #EEC16

I had the privilege to be a part of two panels at EEC16, with some of the best folks in the business. The first panel was “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Deliverability, but Were Afraid to Ask.”   We had a lot of great audience questions. The first question, which was awesome (and I don’t think planted) was: “What is the most important thing we can do to improve...

Insight into Gmail filtering

Last week I posted a link to an article discussing how Gmail builds defenses to protect their users from malicious mail. One of the things I found very interesting in that article was the discussion about how Gmail deploys many changes at once, to prevent people from figuring out what the change was. Let’s take a look at what Gmail said. Make it hard for attackers to understand your...

Ask Laura: Can you help me understand no auth / no entry?

Dear Laura, I’m a little confused by the term “no auth / no entry”. Gmail and other major receivers seem to be moving towards requiring authentication before they’ll even consider delivery. Does this just mean SPF and DKIM, or does this mean the much more stringent DMARC, as well? Thanks, No Shirt, No Shoes, No What Now? Shirtless & Shoeless, “No auth / no entry” is...

Thoughts on filters

One of the questions we received during the EEC16 closing keynote panel was why isn’t there a single blocklist that everyone uses and why don’t ISPs share data more. It would be so much easier for senders if every ISP handled mail the same as every other. But the world isn’t that simple, and it’s not always clear which mail stream is spam and which is good mail. There were...

Dueling data

One of the things I miss about being in science is the regular discussions (sometimes heated) about data and experimental results. To be fair, I get some of that when talking about email stuff with Steve. We each have some strong view points and aren’t afraid to share them with each other and with other people. In fact, one of the things we hear most when meeting folks for the first time...

Thoughts from #EEC16

EEC16 was my first Email Experience conference. I was very impressed. Dennis, Len, and Ryan put together a great program. I made it to two of the keynotes and both took me out of an email focused place to look at the bigger picture. Patrick Scissons discussed his experiences creating marketing and advertising campaigns for good and to share messages. Some of the campaigns were ones I’d seen...

March 2016: The Month In Email

Happy April! I’m just back from the EEC conference in New Orleans, which was terrific. I wrote a quick post about a great session on content marketing, and I’ll have more to add about the rest of the conference over the next week or so. Stay tuned! Here’s a look at what caught our attention in March: On the DMARC front, we noted that both Yahoo and mail.ru are moving forward with p=reject, and...

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