Lots of times I see someone asking a question and they talk about their sending domain. And it’s sometimes not 100% clear which domain they mean by that – and when we’re talking about alignment and reputation it can make a difference. So here’s a list of (some of?) the different places a mailserver uses a domain. Hostnames Machine Hostname: What the operating system...
If you’re using Entrust for your BIMI VMC …
BIMI is the protocol you can use to publish an icon to display in the inbox of some large consumer webmail providers. To have it displayed at Gmail you need more than just clean DMARC and a published BIMI record, you also need to have a Verified Mark Certificate, a VMC. A VMC is a certificate, very similar in many ways to the TLS certificates used to secure webpages. It’s issued by a...
Who’s your Email Czar?
The gentleman with the excellent hat is Иван IV Васильевич, The Great Sovereign, Tsar and Grand Prince of all Russia, Vladimir, Moscow, Novgorod, Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan, Sovereign of Pskov, Grand Prince of Smolensk, Tver, Yugorsk, Perm, Vyatka, Bolgar and others, Sovereign and Grand Prince of Novgorod of the Lower Land, Chernigov, Ryazan, Polotsk, Rostov, Yaroslavl, Beloozero, Livonia...
Deliveries and Opens and Clicks
I always want to say “Emails, and Opens, and Clicks… Oh My!” when I’m talking about them. We really want to understand how a mailbox provider perceives the streams of email we send them. Some of the things the provider looks at are technical and objective – is the email coming from who it claims to be coming from? Is there an attachment that contains a virus? We have...
Warmup is Communication
A still from Cargo Cult, by Bastien Dubois During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like...
Filter Evasion
It’s deliverability week, so everyone is talking about deliverability. But I’d like to take a moment to mention deliverability’s evil twin from the mirror universe – filter evasion. The goal of filter evasion seems at first sight very similar to that of deliverability – put the email in the inbox – but the two practices start from very different places...
Deliverability is Collaborative
Mailbox providers want happy recipients Mailbox providers want their users to be happy with the mail they receive and the service they get. That’s driven by stark business reasons: acquiring new users is costly, happy users bring in revenue – whether directly, or indirectly via advertising – and their word of mouth helps bring in more users, and hence more revenue. That’s...
It’s Deliverability Week
What is Deliverability Week? Al Iverson decided it should happen, and asked a bunch of deliverability folks to share some of their thoughts about the deliverability industry – why do we do this? where did we come from? what’s next? Monday Al’s summary of the day, Deliverability Week: Why deliverability matters to us. Deliverability Matters, and welcome to Deliverability Week...
Deliverability Week
Next week everyone will be talking Deliverability.
Inbox Jam
ISKBTN
Spam Resource
EmailKarma
Us
… and more.
SWAKS: Test your SMTP
We’ve mentioned SWAKS here a few times – but I always use it for delivering test mail directly to a recipient’s MX.
Matt, over at EmailKarma, posted today pointing out that it supports authentication, so you can also use it to send email out from your commercial smarthost. Handy.
Check it out.