Earlier this month, I published a post about some changes with how Google is displaying information related to authentication in their “View Original” page. There’s one condition I apparently didn’t report and it brought up a question earlier today. If a message has alignment between DKIM and the 5322.from address but there is no DMARC record for that domain published in...
Many blocklists use spamtraps to detect poor sending practices and will cite spamtrap hits as the reason for the blocks. Senders legitimately fear spamtraps showing up on their lists because of this. If spamtraps weren’t used by blocklists no one would really care about them. They’re just another kind of bad address. Yesterday I answered a question about whether or not spamtraps...
One of the folks on the Email Geeks slack asked me a question last week that I thought was really insightful and has a somewhat nuanced answer. Do spamtraps really exist? Like, in the sense of being a real mailbox? They actually exist just like any other mailbox, yes? Otherwise they can’t be monitored and reported on. This includes typo spamtraps, correct? Do spamtraps exist? A spam trap...
Google has been making a number of changes to their systems over the last few weeks. Folks are seeing a lot of changes in Google postmaster tools and they’re seeing changes in how Google is displaying headers in the “show original” tab. One thing that some folks were seeing is a message that says: This “Alignment” description replaced the DMARC verdict in the header...
I’ve been doing a lot of my question answering over on the Email Geeks slack and have decided to bring some of the answers over here. Today’s question: My ESP provides a dashboard of spam complaints. How should I be looking at the data? Are some complaints more important than others? The spam complaint dashboard is a record of the feed back loop messages (FBLs) that an ESP has...
In October 2023, Yahoo and Google announced new standards for sending bulk mail to their systems. For bulk senders these changes included requiring aligned authentication and publishing a DMARC record and complying with the List-Unsubscribe RFC. The ISPs also formally announced complaints must stay below a threshold of 0.3%. At the time of the announcement, they said enforcement would start in...
There always seems to be appetite from folks to read the tea leaves and follow up with predictions about what the future holds. I mean, how many folks in the US are obsessively refreshing polls for the last few weeks? (American’s: don’t forget to vote on Tuesday!) The reality is, though, we don’t know what the future holds and we can’t always make predictions. I’ve...
It’s time we talk about cold outreach mail. In the last 2 years the volume and aggressiveness of cold outreach mail seems to have exploded. There are dozens of companies out there who are selling services to companies to facilitate cold outreach. My own sales mailbox is full of requests from companies to help them solve their delivery problems. So let’s talk about cold outreach...
DMARC is the newest of the authentication protocols. It compares the domain in the From: address to the domains authenticated by SPF and DKIM. If either SPF or DKIM pass and they are in the same organizational domain as the domain in the From: address then the email is authenticated with DMARC. I wrote A Brief DMARC primer back in 2014 – when Yahoo deployed p=reject late on a Friday and...
A common complaint about the advice or answers any deliverability person gives is that the generic answer to questions is: It Depends. This is frustrating for a lot of folks because they think they’re asking a simple question and so, clearly, there should be one, simple, clear answer. The problem is that there is almost never one answer in deliverability and details do matter. Let’s...
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