Number six of seven in our occasional series on why ESPs need, or don’t need, lots of IP addresses to send mail properly. I need multiple IP addresses in different locations to provide redundancy against network outages Why this is right If all your traffic goes out via a single ISP and your connection to that ISP is eaten by a backhoe you’re not going to be sending any email until...
Number five of seven in our occasional series on why ESPs need, or don’t need, lots of IP addresses to send mail properly. I need multiple IP addresses per customer so as to manage filtering issues Why this is right If you have, for example, three dedicated IP addresses per customer and one of those IP addresses gets “randomly” blacklisted, then you can divert traffic to the other two...
Someone asked today on a mailing list whether they should be using UTF-8 or “ISO” encoding for sending email. What’s the best choice depends on some of the details of the situation, but here’s the answer I gave: UTF-8 will work for pretty much anything, as it’s just an 8 bit encoding scheme for Unicode (which is supposed to be the one character encoding to rule them...
I saw a nicely done example of integrating email into other marketing channels over the weekend. I was helping a friend pick out a receiver and speakers for their home theatre system on Saturday afternoon. As we were chatting over IRC there was a lot of pasting URLs back and forth, as we tried to juggle speaker components to get a nice, balanced setup on a budget that was fairly tight for a...
For companies who are sending mail on their own behalf Create and send a message that recipients look forward to receiving Send that mail technically correctly, such that it causes no problems at the recipients ISP For ESPs, sending mail on behalf of others Find (or develop) a customer base who create and send messages that recipients look forward to receiving Send that mail technically...
The default SpamAssassin configuration considers any date far in the future to be extremely suspicious, which is pretty reasonable. However, as @schampeo points out, it also seems to consider any date later than 2009 to be “far in the future”. That means that until the SpamAssassin folks roll out a fix, and that gets deployed by SpamAssassin users pretty much all email will get an...
Number four of seven in our occasional series on why ESPs need, or don’t need, lots of IP addresses to send mail properly. I need multiple IP addresses per customer so that that customer can deliver mail in a timely manner Why this is right If your customer needs to deliver a message to 100,000 recipients within 30 minutes and 3% of them are at an ISP that only accepts 1000 emails per recipient...
Earlier Laura talked about a communication gap between ESPs and ISPs. My take on it is that it’s something more than just a difficulty in communicating, rather it’s a division due to differences in personality and approach of those individuals whose primary interest is themselves and those whose primary interest is the health of the overall email ecosystem. The former group (who I...
After a little more than two years and 500 posts we thought it was time for a redesign of the Word to the Wise blog. While we were cleaning up the design we also fixed some functionality that was broken and added some new features: Everything should render cleanly in most any browser Search works! The archives, over on the right hand side, are a lot easier to navigate If you visit the blog from...
In part 1 I talked about internationalised domain names, and how they were mapped onto ASCII strings. For sending email there are four bits of the message where internationalisation might need to be considered. Sender or recipient email address Header content, such as the Subject line or the “friendly” name in the To or From The visible body of the message The web URLs the body of the...
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