Recent Posts

June 2014: The month in email

Each month, we like to focus on a core email feature or function and present an overview for people looking to learn more. This month, we addressed authentication with SPF.
We also talked about feedback mechanisms, and the importance for senders to participate in FBL processes.
In our ongoing discussions about spam filters, we took a look at the state of our own inboxes and lamented the challenge spam we get from Spamarrest. We also pointed out a post from Cloudmark where they reiterate much of what we’ve been saying about filters: there’s no secret sauce, just a continuing series of efforts to make sure recipients get only the mail they want and expect to receive. We also looked at a grey area in the realm of wanted and expected mail: role accounts (such as “marketing@companyname.com”) and how ESPs handle them.
As always, getting into the Gmail inbox is a big priority for our clients and other senders. We talked a bit about this here, and a bit more about the ever-changing world of filters here.
On the subject of list management, we wrote about the state of affiliate mailers and the heightened delivery challenges they face getting in the inbox. We got our usual quota of spam, and a call from a marketer who had purchased our names on a list. You can imagine how effective that was for them.
And in a not-at-all-surprising development, spammers have started to employ DMARC workarounds. We highlighted some of the Yahoo-specific issues in a post that raises more questions.
We also saw some things we quite liked in June. In the Best Practices Hall of Fame, we gave props to this privacy policy change notification and to our bank’s ATM receipts.
We also reviewed some interesting new and updated technology in the commercial MTA space, and were happy to share those findings.

Read More

Happy Canada Day, CASL now in effect

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:

Read More

Incorrect rejection messages

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:

Read More

Spam disclaimer of the day

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.

Read More

Ever changing filtering

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 filtering companies. With traps there is no discussion about whether or not the mail was requested. No one with any connection to the email address opted in to receive mail. The mail was never requested. While it is possible for trap addresses to get on any list monitoring mail to spam traps is a way to monitor which senders don’t have good practices.
New filtering techniques are always evolving. I mentioned yesterday that Gmail was making filtering changes, and that this was causing a lot of delivery issues for senders. The other major challenge for Gmail is the personalized delivery they are doing. It’s harder and harder for senders to monitor their inbox delivery because almost every inbox is different at Gmail. I’ve seen different delivery in some of my own mailboxes at Gmail.
All of this makes email delivery an ongoing challenge.

Read More

Outlook 365 having a bad day

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:

Read More

Delivering to Gmail

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, across a number of clients, is that Gmail is doing a lot of content reputation and that content reputation gets spread across senders of that content.  That means you want to look at who is sending any mail on your behalf (mentioning your domain or pointing at your website) and their practices. If they have poor practices, then it can reflect badly on you and result in filtering.
From what I’ve seen, these are very deliberate filtering decisions by Google. And it’s making mail a lot harder for many, many senders. But I think it is, unfortunately, the new reality.

Read More

Role accounts, ESPs and commercial email

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.

Read More

Filtering secret sauce

It seems one of the most asked questions I hear from people is about filters and what the secret sauce is.

Read More

You paid money for that?

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 them my information directly.
She did want to reassure me that I had “no obligation to respond.”
How very thoughtful of her to reassure me that some random person giving her my corporate phone number does not obligate me to anything.
I don’t believe for a second that anyone who knows me signed me up to receive information. But I do appear to have gotten on some new mailing list recently. I’m getting a lot of ‘internship’ and ‘summer work’ offers in snail mail. These advertisements that are clearly targeting a different demographic than the one I belong to.
At least 4 companies (so far) seem to have paid good money for totally fake information about me. Of course, when they’re calling or sending me mail there’s no way I can stop it or fix it. I can’t even tell them their vendor is giving them bad information. I guess I just have to take comfort in the fact that they are wasting their money. I only wish they weren’t wasting my time as well.
This is just one example of why purchasing information, or trusting information filled into websites, is a bad idea. The company selling my information makes their profit and it doesn’t matter that their information is bad. If it really was someone filling in my information, that person is wasting the company’s time.
I’ve worked with marketers long enough to know that they just consider the bad data a cost of doing business. Data integrity just isn’t relevant to making a profit. Send enough email, send enough postcards, ring enough phones and profit appears. Even if their targets aren’t what they were sold.

Read More
Categories
Tags