There are a lot of folks in the email industry that take issue with my stance that DMARC is not a viable solution to phishing. DMARC, at it’s absolute best, addresses one tiny, TINY piece of phishing. Look at this message I received today. My mail client presents this as from Quickbooks and hides the actual from email address from me. Most mail clients do that by default. It is possible to...
One of the things I do for clients is look at who is really handling mail for their subscribers. Steve’s written a nifty tool that does a MX lookup for a list of domains. Then I have a SQL script that takes the raw MX lookup and categorizes not by the domain or even the MX, but by the underlying mail filter. Part of that script classifies domains hosted by Google apps as a separate filter...
In my previous career I was a molecular biologist. Much of my work was done on bacteria but after I left grad school, I ended up working in a developmental biology lab. Bacteria were (mostly) simple: just about every trait was controlled by a single gene. We could study what that gene did by removing it from the bacteria or adding it to a well characterised bacteria. When I moved to developmental...
Back in April I wrote about some poor marketing automation that ended up spamming me with ‘cart abandonment’ emails when the issue was the company’s credit card processing went down. That post has now been scraped by the spammers Moosend and they keep sending me… poorly targeted automated spam. So, yes, Moosend (who are prolific and annoying spammers) are sending me spam...
There’s a lot of my education in the sciences that focused on how to get a statistically accurate sample. There’s a lot of math involved to pick the right sample size. Then there’s an equal amount of math involved to figure out the right statistical tests to analyse the data. One of the lessons of grad school was: the university has statistics experts, use them when designing...
In my post earlier this week, katie asks: what do you do next when the problem statement is as non-specific as “open rates are falling”? how would you go about getting from there to that next level of marketing email from our ESP goes to bulk? That’s a great question, and will help me explain pieces I didn’t in the initial post. The observation here is: “open rates are falling...
At the end of last year, Steve wrote a post about the different types of authentication. I thought I’d build on that and write about the costs associated with each type. While I know a lot of my readers are actually on the sending side, I’m also going to talk about the costs associated with the receiving side and a little bit about the costs for intermediaries such as CRM systems or...
Everyone has their own way of troubleshooting problems. I thought I would list out the steps I take when I’m trying to troubleshoot them. Clarify the problem. As a consultant, folks come to me asking me to help them solve their delivery problems. My first step is to get them to clarify what symptoms they’re seeing. Something happened to make them contact me, and that’s where we...
Well, it’s 2020. The start of a new year and a new decade, or not depending on what number theory you use to count decades. Personally, I think we, as pattern loving humans, just happen to love numbers that end with 0 and we’re going to consider it special whether or not it’s the actual end or start of a decade. This is the point in time where many blogs are doing year end (or...
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