Archive2019

September 19, 2019

Should you publish a DMARC policy statement?

By laura

4 Min read

1 comment

19September

DMARC is a protocol that makes it very, very simple to shoot yourself in the foot. Setup is tricky and if you don’t get it exactly right you risk creating deliverability problems. The vast majority of companies SHOULD NOT publish a DMARC policy with p=reject or p=quarantine for their existing domains. DMARC policy statements are, essentially, a way for a company to assert the following...

September 17, 2019

Spamming for deliverability

By laura

3 Min read

1 comment

17September

This morning I woke up to a job offer. I hear a number of other email deliverability folks received the same job offer. I am writing to you from [Company].  We are one of the oldest and best reputed partners for Salesforce.  We have succeeded because we only hire the best, most experienced developers.  We have a need for an excellent expert in deliverability.  We have been...

September 12, 2019

Null sender address

By laura

1 Min read

1 comment

12September

A question came up on the email geeks slack channel about empty from addresses. I asked if they meant the 5321 or 5322 from address which prompted a question about if you could even have a null 5321 from. Yes, you can and it’s commonly used for some types of email. 5321.from is the bounce address, and the domain used in SPF authentication. Null addresses, literally <>, are used for email...

September 9, 2019

When you can’t get a response

By laura

5 Min read

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09September

I’ve seen a bunch of folks in different places looking for advice on what to do when they can’t get a response from a postmaster team, or a filtering company. I was all set to write yet another post about how silence is an answer. Digging through the archives, though, I see I’ve written about this twice already in the last 18 months. Well. OK then. Instead of retreading...

September 6, 2019

Update on Tulsi Gabbard sues Google

By laura

2 Min read

2 comments

06September

Back in July the Tulsi Gabbard campaign sued Google for deactivating their “advertising account” on the night of the first Democratic debate. I’ve been waiting for the Google response, which was due to be filed today. I checked today and found a new filing. Apparently counsel for both sides got together recently and decided that Tulsi’s campaign was going to submit an...

September 5, 2019

Yahoo having problems

By laura

1 Min read

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05September

Yahoo seems to be having some massive system issues the last 24 hours or so. DNS has been down, mail was down. I’m seeing reports things are coming back now, but there’s a lot of backed up mail traffic and the congestion may take a few hours to resolve. If you have the ability to do traffic shaping on the sending end, now would be a good time to be extra conservative in your sending...

August 30, 2019

To no-reply or not

By laura

1 Min read

4 comments

30August

One of the ongoing arguments in deliverability is whether or not to use no-reply in the From address of email marketing. There are very strong opinions on both sides. I’ve even had people ask me to comment or ask me to back up their particular point of view. My point of view is pretty simple. This is a customer relationship issue not a delivery issue. The presence of a no-reply@ address in...

August 29, 2019

DMARC doesn’t fix phishing

By laura

3 Min read

4 comments

29August

Over the last few weeks I’ve had a lot of discussions with folks about DMARC and the very slow adoption. A big upsurge and multiple Facebook discussions were triggered by the ZDNet article DMARCs abysmal adoption explains why email spoofing is still a thing. There are a lot of reasons DMARC’s adoption has been slow, and I’m working on a more comprehensive discussion. But one of...

August 27, 2019

Cox: no more new email addresses

By laura

2 Min read

1 comment

27August

A few days ago Cox disabled email address account creation for their domain. In recent years, fewer customers have taken advantage of a Cox Email account, so we decided to modify our email service to better serve our customers. As of August 15, 2019, Cox no longer offers the ability for new and existing Cox Internet customers to create new Cox Email accounts. Customers with Cox Email accounts...

August 26, 2019

d= for data

By laura

3 Min read

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26August

A few ISPs use the d= value in the DKIM signature as a way to provide FBL and reputation data to senders. This has some good bits, in that senders can get FBLs and other information regardless of the IP address they’re using and whether or not they have sole access to it. There are also some challenges with using the d= as a data identifier. One of them is that ESPs may not be able to get a...