It’s Canada Day, and this year it has special connotations for email senders who are in Canada or sending to Canadian residents. CASL is now in effect. For in depth guidance, go visit Matt Vernhout’s excellent series on CASL. But for those of you who just want the Cliff notes here’s the high points If you are in Canada or you are sending to residents in Canada: You must have...
At least one ESP and Spamhaus are currently investigating bounce messages at a couple ISPs incorrectly pointing to Spamhaus as the reason for the block. The bounce messages are taking the form: smtp; 554 p3plibsmtp03-07.prod.phx3.secureserver.net bizsmtp IB105. Connection refused. 192.0.2.24 is listed on the Exploits Block List (XBL) <; Please visit for more information. smtp; 553 5.7.1 [BL21]...
Things are extremely busy here so blogging is not getting quite the attention it should. I hope to return to more extensive posts soon. Meanwhile, you’ll have to put up with short posts. Today is a disclaimer I received in a spam. This is one of my addresses that has, somehow, ended up on UK-specific lists. Disclaimer: “Note:- We are not spammer. We found your email through manually...
One of the ongoing challenges sending email, and managing a high volume outbound mail server is dealing with the ongoing changes in filtering. Filters are not static, nor can they be. As ISPs and filtering companies identify new ways to separate out wanted email from unwanted email, spammers find new ways to make their mail look more like wanted mail. This is one reason traps are useful to...
I’ve seen scattered reports today that some mail to the Outlook 365 servers is failing. This has been confirmed by ZDNet. Only folks with a Office 365 account can log in and see the status messages, but there are some folks on the mailop list posting updates from the website. Attempts to mail to affected domains results in this response: 421 4.3.2 The maximum number of concurrent server...
Gmail is a challenge for even the best senders these days. With the recent Gmail changes there isn’t any clear fix to getting open rates or inbox delivery back up. Some of it depends on what is causing Gmail to filter the mail. Changing subject lines, from name, from address may get mail back to the inbox in the short term, but it only works until the filters catch up. What I am seeing...
There was a discussion today on a marketing list about role accounts and marketing lists. Some ESPs block mail to role accounts, and the discussion was about why and if this is a good practice. In order to answer that question, we really need to understand role accounts a little more. What are role accounts? A definition I tend to use is role accounts are email addresses that map to a business...
It seems one of the most asked questions I hear from people is about filters and what the secret sauce is. Cloudmark’s processes which determine which IPs get a poor or suspect reputation in our CSI products, take into account many different factors, including both spam trap hits and volume of trusted end user complaints (hitting the “This is spam” button), reputation of the reverse DNS of the...
I just got a call from someone claiming that I “filled out an online form” asking for more information about “an online education.” When pressed, the nice woman kept changing her story about who she was calling for or how she got my phone number. Eventually she admitted that they have a collection of 50 or more websites and it’s very possible that I didn’t give...
One of the things our bank does that I really like is send ATM receipts directly to the email address associated with the ATM card. No more random pieces of paper I have to track down, it’s all there in my mailbox. This week I noticed that the bank is leveraging the transactional mail to tell me about new services they provide. I think this is awesome. I get my receipt and I get to learn...
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