SNDS issues and new Gmail

A bunch of folks reported problems with Microsoft’s SNDS page earlier today. This afternoon, our friendly Microsoft rep told the mailop mailing list that it should be fixed. If you see problems again, you can report it to mailop or your ESP and the message will get shared to the folks who can fix it.
The other big thing that happened today was Gmail rolled out their new inbox layout.
It’s… nice. I’ll be honest, I am not a big gmail user and have never been a huge fan. I got my first account way-back-during-the-beta. I used it to handle some of my mailing list mail. I could never work out how to get it to stop breaking threads by deciding to put some mail into the junk folder. I just gave up and went back to my shell with procmail (now sieve) scripts. I still have a couple lists routed to my gmail account, and the filtering is much improved – I can at least tell it to never bulk folder certain email.
The feature I’m really interested in is the confidential, expiring email. I’m interested in how that’s going to work with non-Gmail accounts. Within Gmail makes perfect sense, but I don’t think Gmail can control mail once it’s off their system.

My best guess is that Gmail will end up sending some type of secure link to recipients using non-Gmail mail servers. The message itself will stay inside Google and recipients will only be able to view mail through the web. That’s how the vast majority of secure mail systems work.
If anyone has the secure message already, feel free to send me a secure message. I’ll report back as to how it works.

What kind of mail do filters target?
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Change is coming…

A lot of email providers are rolling out changes to their systems. Some of these changes are so they will comply with GDPR. But, in other cases, the changes appear coincidental with GDPR coming into effect.
It seems, finally, some attention is being paid to the mail client. Over the last few years the webmail providers have tried to upgrade their interface.  Many of the upgrades are about managing high volumes of email in a more efficient manner. Google uses tabs while Microsoft has sweep and focused inbox.
It’s about time the mail client got an overhaul. My Apple mail client doesn’t look all that different from the desktop client I was using back in the late 90s on OS/2 Warp back in the late 90s. In some ways the OS/2 client was actually more functional. And, well, I do miss a lot of the flexibility of mutt in the shell.
Today, Google announced to Google Suite administrators that they would be rolling out a major client overhaul. G Suite admins who want to can join the early adopter program in the coming week. Techcrunch has a sketch of what the new mailbox layout looks like, done by someone who says they saw a Google engineer working on a train.
What’s interesting about the sketch is it seems tabs are going away. Given how many senders hate tabs I’m sure this is a welcome relief. We’ll see, though, if there’s not more inbox management built into the new client or not. The nifty new features are “snooze” – hide this email for some period of time and bring it back at some point in the future. The other big thing is calendar access right from the mail client.
I expect, too, that as OATH: brings the Yahoo and AOL mailboxes under one banner, there will also be some changes there. All of this amounts to more uncertainty in the email delivery space. But we’ll get through, we always do.

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Microsoft MXs changed over

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Microsoft deprecating SmartScreen filters

At the beginning of the month Microsoft announced that they were deprecating the SmartScreen filters used by the desktop Microsoft mail clients. These are the filters used in Exchange and various version of Outlook mail. This is yet further consolidation of spam filtering between the Microsoft free webmail domains, Office365 hosted domains and self hosted Exchange servers.  The online services (hotmail.com, outlook.com, Office365, live.com, etc) have been  using these filters for a while. The big change now is that they’re being pushed down to Exchange and Outlook users not hosted on the Microsoft site.
EOP was developed for Outlook.com (and friends) as well as Office365 users. From Microsoft’s description, it sounds like the type of machine learning engine that many providers are moving to.
Microsoft has published quite a bit of information about these filters and how they work on their website. One of the best places to start is the Anti-spam Protection FAQ. Something senders should pay attention to is the final question on that page: “What are a set of best outbound mailing practices that will ensure that my mail is delivered?” Those are all things  deliverability folks recommend for good inbox delivery.
Poking around looking at the links and descriptions, there is a host of great information about spam filtering at Microsoft and how it works.
A page of note is their Exchange Online Protection Overview. This describes the EOP process and how the filters work.
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