When you look up a host name, a mailserver or anything else there are three types of reply you can get. The way they’re described varies from tool to tool, but they’re most commonly referred to using the messages dig returns – NXDOMAIN, NOERROR and SERVFAIL. NXDOMAIN is the simplest – it means that there’s no DNS record that matches your query (or any other query for...
The CBL website is back on line. It’s possible that your local DNS resolver has old values for it cached. If so, and if you can’t flush your local DNS cache, and you really can’t wait until DNS has been updated then you may be able to put a temporary entry in your hosts file to point to cbl.abuseat.org. You can get the IP address you need to add by querying the nameserver at ns...
Over the weekend I noticed a new CSS framework aimed at email rather than web development, “Antwort“. This isn’t the first or only framework for email content, but this one looks simple and robust, and it allows for content that doesn’t just adapt for different sized displays but looks good on all of them. The idea behind it is to divide your content into columns, magazine...
A couple of days ago an ex-employee of Opt-In Inc., was kind enough to do a Reddit AMA answering questions about their experience working with Steve Hardigree in the “legitimate” email marketing industry, back in the early 2000s. The whole thing is worth a read, but I thought I’d share some of his more interesting answers here. Everyone knows everyone The spam business was super...
Last night, the email practices of Facebook, Verizon and LinkedIn sparked something of a discussion on IRC. Rather than trying to summarize into a business language friendly post I thought I’d share the whole thing. Warning: Includes strong language and graphic descriptions of human on salesman violence. Huey: I may have just arrived at a Laura guest blog post. Huey: About...
I’ve seen this trick used by a few senders recently, with varying effectiveness. Where do they get these pictures? While you can scatter any images you like across the body of your message, the subject line is limited to just text. But “text” is more than just “a, b, c” – using RFC 2047 encoding you can use any character you like, including many tiny pictures...
After they were a a little embarrassed by their own DKIM keys being poorly managed a few months ago, Google seem to have been going through their inbound DKIM handling and tightening up on their validation so that badly signed mail that really shouldn’t be treated as DKIM signed, won’t be treated as signed by Gmail. This is a good thing, especially as things like DMARC start to be...
Email – and email filtering – makes a lot of use of DNS, and it’s fairly easy to miss something. Here are a few checklists to help: Data you need before you start: [table] Information,for example Return path / bounce address,bounces.myesp.com Mailserver hostname,mail4.myesp.com Mailserver external address,192.0.2.4 DKIM “d=”,greatbigmarketer.com DKIM selector,oct2012...
Any ESP that supports multiple mailing lists per customer lets you name your mailing lists. That’s useful for keeping track of where a list was from , but sometimes those list names are visible to the recipient: Here the list name is visible on the opt-out / email preferences form, but you’ll also see them in (hidden) email headers or (visible) email footers. “Last 10000”...
I have a frequent flyer account with Virgin America. They want me to sign up for some new thing, and they’ve sent me two emails about it so far, with lots of good call-to-action language, and a big “Join Now” button. But this is the start of the form that clicking on that button leads to: (It goes on further, finally ending up with a captcha and a submit button.) Virgin America...
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