We have multiple measures of deliverability. Ones that we don’t even let in the door, and then we have ones that customers indicated that they don’t want to be delivered.
– Jeff Bonforte, Senior VP Communications, Yahoo Mail
Read a little more about Yahoo and spam over at Tech Insider, or listen to the podcast at codebreaker.codes.
Trawling through the junk folder
As a break from writing unit tests this morning I took a few minutes to go through my Mail.app junk folder, looking for false positives for mail delivered over the past six weeks. We don’t do any connection level rejection here, so any mail sent to me gets delivered somewhere. Anything that looks like malware gets dumped in one folder and never read, anything that scores a ridiculously high...
DMARC News – Gmail p=reject and ARC
DMARC.org announced this morning that Gmail will be moving to publishing a p=reject DMARC record in June of next year, much the same as Yahoo and AOL have. Unlike Yahoo and AOL, Gmail are giving those who will be affected plenty of time to prepare for any issues, and have waited until there are some potential ways to mitigate problems in the development pipeline. The ARC proposal, mentioned in...
Network Solutions email issues
According to twitter and mailop Network Solutions is having issues with inbound mail, with both TCP level disconnections and 451 deferrals. @annaciamp @netsolcares We're seeing email from our servers to netsol queuing up, consistently since 9:51 am (U.S. Central) — Frank Bulk (@frankbulk) October 14, 2015 Down Detector and other reports suggest it’s been an issue since about 8am...
Lost in the mists of time
Over on the Farsight Security blog Joe St. Sauver talks about some of the early days of online abuse, on usenet. Laura and I were on the periphery of early usenet abuse, mostly as users, but Usenet (and IRC) around then were the places we both started with email abuse.
IPv6 and authentication
I just saw a post over on the mailop mailing list where someone had been bitten by some of the IPv6 email issues I discussed a couple of months ago. They have dual-stack smarthosts – meaning that their smarthosts have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, and will choose one or the other to send mail over. Some domains they send to use Office 365 and opted-in to receiving mail over IPv6, so their...
Two factor authentication
The drumbeat of “secure your accounts; help your customers secure their accounts with you” advice has faded away a bit, probably because we’ve not had a major ESP account compromise hit the media in the past few months. The costs – customer support, security, reputation, executive focus – of customer account compromises are still significant, anything you can easily...
Outrunning the Bear
You’ve started to notice that your campaigns aren’t working as well as they used to. Your metrics suggest fewer people are clicking through, perhaps because more of your mail is ending up in junk folders. Maybe your outbound queues are bigger than they used to be. You’ve not changed anything – you’re doing what’s worked well for years – and it’s not...
TXTing
On Friday I talked a bit about the history behind TXT records, their uses and abuses. But what’s in a TXT record? How is it used? When and where should you use them? Here’s what you get if you query for the TXT records for exacttarget.com from a unix or OS X command line with dig exacttarget.com txt ~ ∙ dig exacttarget.com txt ; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>>...
A brief history of TXT Records
When the Domain Name System was designed thirty years ago the concept behind it was pretty simple. It’s mostly just a distributed database that lets you map hostname / query-type pairs to values. If you want to know the IP address of cnn.com, you look up {cnn.com, A} and get back a couple of IP addresses. If you want to know where to send mail for aol.com users, you look up {aol.com, MX}...