Yesterday I talked about the technical definitions of an email address. Eventually on Monday I’m going to talk about some useful day-to-day rules about email address acquisition and analysis, but first I’m going to take a detour into tagging or mailboxing email addresses. Tagging an email address is something the owner of an email address can do to make it easier to handle incoming...
Given we deal with email addresses every day, dozens or thousands or millions of them, it seems a bit strange to ask what an email address is – but given some of the problems people have with the grubbier corners of address syntax it’s actually an interesting question. There are two real standards that define what is a valid email address and what isn’t. The most complex is RFC...
This morning I got spam about college basketball – Subject: Inside: your ESPN Tourney Guide. That’s anything but unusual, but this spam got through my spam filters and into my inbox. That’s a rare enough event that I’m already annoyed before I click on the mail in order to mark it as spam. Wait a second, the spam claims to be from Adobe. And it’s sent to a tagged...
Most ISP feedback loops require you to demonstrate that you’re really responsible for your domain before they’ll start forwarding reports to you. The usual way that works is pretty similar to a closed-loop opt-in signup for a mailing list – the ISP sends an email with a link in it to the abuse@ and postmaster@ aliases for your domain, and you need to click the link in one or...
As we mentioned earlier Habeas is being bought out by ReturnPath. While they’ve not actually used it for several years the thing that Habeas will be remembered for is their introduction of the Haiku form of poetry into email headers: winter into spring brightly anticipated like Habeas SWE ™ How better to commemorate that than with some email themed Haiku? Some email delivery folks...
A few years ago it was “common knowledge” that if you were sending large amounts of email to an ISP the most polite way to do that, the way that would put the least load on the receiving mailserver, was to open a single SMTP session to the mailserver and then to send all the mail for that ISP down that single connection. That’s because the receiving mailserver is concerned about...
… or Why do spam filters sometimes have some very strange ideas? It’s been dogma for a long time that if you’re doing email marketing you should avoid using a .biz domain in your mails. Even if your main website was in .biz, you should use something different in your messages, perhaps a website you buy solely for use in email that redirects to your real .biz website. Last year I...
This really should be part seven of a twelve part series or some such as it deals with an aspect of DKIM that’s really important, but is way down in the details of implementation. (dkim.org is a reasonable place to start for a general overview of DKIM). There’s an apparently endless thread on the DKIM-SSP spec development mailing list at the moment about the differences between two...
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