Some notes on some of the different protocols used for authentication and authentication-adjacent things in email. Some of this is oral history, and some of it may be contradicted by later or more public historical revision. SPF Associates an email with a domain that takes responsibility for it. Originally Sender Permitted From, now Sender Policy Framework. It allows a domain owner to announce...
Google IP reputation bad
This morning hundreds of delivery folks logged into their Google Postmaster Tools account to see their IP reputation was bad.
Even one of my client’s that is using a major ESP shared pools is seeing bad IP reputation on December 10, 2019.
The good news is this doesn’t seem to be affecting delivery. Most folks are reporting no delivery issues at Gmail and no change in open rates.
It’s not marketing… it’s harassment
Many years ago, we bought a VMWare license to manage the various virtual machines running our business infrastructure. As part of our move to Dublin, we decommissioned our cabinet and moved all of services into various bits of the cloud. This meant that when our VMWare support contract came up for renewal we declined the renewal. Despite no longer being customers and unsubscribing from email...
4 beelion emails
Sendgrid announced their volumes for Black Friday and Cyber Monday: To provide a clearer understanding of our scalable systems, on Black Friday 2019 we processed 4.1 billion emails and this Cyber Monday we processed 4.2 billion emails (46% more than 2018) and processed up to 315 million emails/hour (burst rate) into inboxes all around the world! To give you a better understanding of this scale...
It’s the email time of year…
I’m basically waiting for the various ESPs to announce Just How Much Mail they’ve sent over the last 4 days. Early information from one ESP shows a hefty percentage over the amount they sent last year, and that amount had many, many, many zeros in it.
In terms of best practices and ongoing advice: you can never put too many lights on a Christmas tree.
There’s something about bounces
I’ve shared a version of this image repeatedly. I think it was only my Facebook friends that got the stick figure screaming in frustration, though. The reality is bounce handling is one of the most frustrating pieces of email delivery. Not only that, many people in the email space treat it as a simple process. It’s really not as simple as we’d like it to be. The above image was...
Phishing evolves beyond DMARC
The phishing attack against Sendgrid is still going on. Most of the mail and the websites are being hosted on Linode. I’ve still not gotten to see what one of the sites looks like, as Linode is getting the sites down before I click on the links. Everyone here is doing the Right Things(tm) in order to address the problem. Sendgrid has a p=reject message in their DMARC record, Linode seems to...
Alt-text and phishing warnings
For a long time one of the “best practices” for links in html content has been to avoid having anything that looks like a URL or hostname in the visible content of the link, as ISP phishing filters are very, very suspicious of links that seem to mislead recipients about where the link goes to. They’re a very common pattern in phishing emails. /* This is bad: */ <a href="">>...
Myths about spamtraps
The nice folks at Kickbox asked me what I thought the biggest myths about spamtraps were. I said: I think the biggest misconception is that spamtraps are the reason for delivery failures, whether blocking or spamfoldering. When the article came out, I was highly amused to see that John from Campaign Monitor said the same thing in his first sentence, too. A common misconception is that spamtraps...
The internet is different in the EU
One of the interesting things about moving to the EU is experiencing the internet where GDPR is a thing. We get asked permission for everything. Including if we want shopping cart updates. On the email space, though, we’ve been visiting various home shows as we look at options and furniture for our new house. Part of it has involved giving email addresses to various groups in exchange for...