Brief blogging break

Sorry about the unexpected hiatus. I picked up a cold that really made me feel fuzzy and writing was an exercise in futility. I’ll be back Monday. Meanwhile, Oracle bought another ESP (Bronto) when they bought NetSuite.  

Working around email security

One of the common things I see as a delivery consultant is that companies do their best to set effective policies about email, but make it difficult to comply with those policies. It happens all the time. It’s one of the reasons that the tweets Steve shared about Sec. Clinton’s email server rang so true […]

SPF ?all

The most read post on the blog is Authenticating with SPF: -all or ~all. In fact, it’s in the top 5 posts every single day. We still get comments on it, too. Usually from folks who disagree with my recommendations. I still stand by my recommendations, though. It doesn’t really matter if you choose ~all […]

Do you know where your signups are?

Here at Word to the Wise we sign up for a lot of email from our customers. There are multiple reasons we do this. Engagement starts before the first email These days the key to getting to the inbox is sending mail your users want and expect. We always recommend senders start the engagement process […]

Almost Caturday

It’s Friday. It’s been a week. Have a cat picture.

Electronic records outside US not covered by US warrants

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Government today in US Government vs. Microsoft. The government is investigating a drug dealer and want access to records held by Microsoft. Microsoft turned over metadata stored on US machines. But they refused to turn over the specific emails stored on machines in Dublin. The company’s […]

US-EU Privacy Shield Approved

Since the Safe Harbor rules were struck down by EU courts, the US and EU have been in negotiations to replace it. This morning (pacific time) the EU approved the new rules called Privacy Shield. WSJ Article

Politician sends spam, experiences consequences, news at 11

Over the weekend I’ve been seeing a number of over the top, hyperbolic blog posts about the Trump Campaign’s agency getting suspended from their ESP for spamming. Adestra suspended the Donald Trump campaign for “for committing some of the most egregious spamming in the history of the Internet in an effort to save his broke […]

Spam, campaign statistics and red flag URLs

It’s not often spammers send me their campaign statistics, but on Tuesday one did. The spam came “from” news@udemy.com, used udemy.com in the HELO and message-ids and, sure enough, was advertising udemy.com:  

  But the call to action link was a bit.ly URL. Following the clickthroughs, the bit.ly URL redirected to linksynergy.com, which in […]

June 2016: The Month in Email

We’re officially halfway through 2016, and looking forward to a slightly less hectic month around here. I hope you’re enjoying your summer (or winter, for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere).     Our first June blog post marked the fifteen year anniversary of the very first anti-spam conference, SpamCon. As I noted, many […]