More and more I’m moving away from consulting on technical setup issues as the solution to delivery problems. Delivery is not about the technical perfection of a message. Spammers get the technical right all the time. No, instead, delivery is about sending messages the user wants. While looking for something on the blog I found an old post from 2011 that’s still relevant today. In...
Dear Laura, Our company has been shopping around for ESPs and most of them want to put us on a shared IP address. I have always heard that senders should get dedicated IPs. Will this hurt our deliverability? Regards, Sharing is Hard Dear Sharing, For a long time, IP reputation was the major factor in identifying good mail from bad mail. Good IPs helped mail get into the inbox. Poor IPs were...
There are few address acquisition processes that make me cringe as badly as incentivized point of sale collection. Companies have tried many different ways to incentivize address collection at the point of sale. Some offer the benefit to the shopper, like offering discounts if they supply an email address. Some offer the benefits to the employee. Some offer punishments to the employee if they...
August was a busy month for both Word to the Wise and the larger world of email infrastructure. A significant subscription attack targeted .gov addresses, ESPs and over a hundred other industry targets. I wrote about it as it began, and Spamhaus chief executive Steve Linford weighed in in our comments thread. As it continued, we worked with M3AAWG and other industry leaders to share data and...
Not long ago I was talking with a colleague who works for an ESP. She was telling me about this new client who is in the process of negotiating a contract. Normally she doesn’t get involved in negotiations, but the sales group brought her. It seems this new client is attempting to remove all mention of the anti-spam policy from the contract. As she is the deliverability and compliance...
More than a decade ago I was included in one of these. It wasn’t work related per se, but the address list included a lot of experienced, BTDT, names-on-RFCs technology folks.
Yeah, even they got stuck in the mess of replying all, unsubscribing, lecturing people about not replying to all. It was a mess, but funny given the names involved. #neverdothis #noreplytoall
The recent subscription bombs have started me thinking about how online organizations handle abuse, or don’t as the case may be. Deciding what to address is all about severity. More severe incidents are handled first. Triage is critical, there’s never really enough time or resources to investigate abuse. What makes an event severe? The answer is more complicated that one might think...
There’s been a discussion on the mailop list about the number of different blocklists out there. There are discussions about whether we need so many lists, and how difficult the different lists make it to run a small mail system (80K or so users). This discussion wandered around a little bit, but started me thinking about how we got to a place where there are hundreds of different...
If you’re sharing sensitive computer security information it’s important to know how sensitive a document is, and who you can share it with. US-CERT and many other security organizations use Traffic Light Protocol as shorthand for how sensitive the information in a document is. It’s simple and easy to remember with just four colour categories: Red, Amber, Green and White. If...
Dear Laura, I’ve been having a discussion with a colleague who is particularly frustrated by unwanted email he gets from retailers. Specifically, these are retailers who he’s never given an email address, but whose sites he’s browsed recently. He understands how retargeting works with web ads, but questions if it’s really acceptable to retarget in the email channel or if that violates CAN-SPAM or...
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