Recent Posts

VerticalResponse acquired

The acquisition of email service providers continues. Last week Deluxe (yes, the check printing people) acquired Vertical Response. This appears to be positioning themselves to improve their collection of business services to include email marketing.

SPF Fail: too many DNS lookups

I’ve had a couple folks come to me recently for help troubleshooting SPF failures. The error messages said the SPF record was invalid, but by all checks it was valid.
Eventually, we tracked the issue down to how many include files were in the SPF record.
The SPF specification specifically limits the number of lookups that can happen during a SPF check.

One letter off…

I’m working on a blog post about the new Gmail tabbed inbox and the messages Gmail is inserting into the promotions tab. The messages aren’t showing up on most of my accounts, so I logged into an infrequently used account of mine. Ads are there, I got my screenshots and some data about the behaviour of the messages. So far so good.
I also discovered that at least two other women are using my address. One of them apparently ordered a bunch of wedding stuff from David’s Bridal shop using my email address. I hope Kirstie got her special order in time.
The other case is more interesting. I found dozens of emails in my inbox from what appeared to be friends including me in their email forward chain.
The Comic Sans. The FW:FW:FW:FW:FW subject lines. The horribly drawn cartoons. The inspirational messages. The prayer requests. The invites to bridge night. The followup demands that I reply to their invites for bridge night. The sad emails that I didn’t go to bridge night. There were emails from grandchildren. Questions about where I’d been and if I moved. Prayer chains. The messages go on and on.
Looking back through my inbox, this has been going on since sometime late in 2012. (Told you this was an infrequently used account). I looked and looked and I think I figured out what happened. A woman named Helen appears to to have an email address one letter off from mine (string@ vs stringsstring@) and one of her church friends tried to reply to her and dropped the ‘s’ from the email address. Once she did that, everyone else just kept hitting “reply all” and are including me in their forward chain.
It’s not commercial, it’s not spam. It’s just a bunch of people mistyping an email address and sending mail to someone they don’t know. I’m kinda glad it was a bunch of church ladies rather than Carlos Danger sending … well… Carlos Danger type messages.
People get email addresses wrong sometimes. It happens (ask me about the time I almost got my mailserver blocked because I mistyped an address while sending mail to a blocklist maintainer and hit a trap address by mistake…). The problem is that it can overwhelm an uninvolved person’s mailbox, even when it’s not commercial. Sure, if I was logging in to this account more often I’d probably have shut it down, but if they were paying attention they would have realized Helen is never replying to anything they send.
I kinda feel the same about commercial mailers that send me mail over and over and over again. I never open it, I never reply to it, I never respond to it. I wonder if there is actually anyone actually sending the mail, or if there’s just a lonely mailserver bricked up in a wall somewhere continually sending out spam.
Don’t be the bricked up server in the wall. Pay attention to what your recipients are doing.

Delivery implications of Yahoo releasing usernames

Yahoo announced a few weeks ago it would be releasing account names back into the general pool. This, understandably, caused a lot of concern among marketers about how this would affect email delivery at Yahoo. I had the opportunity to talk with a Yahoo employee last week, and ask some questions about how this might affect delivery.
Q: How many email addresses are affected?

Spamhaus answers marketer questions

A few months ago, Ken Magill asked marketers, including the folks at Only Influencers to provide him with questions to pass along to Spamhaus. Spamhaus answered the first set in March, but then were hit with the Stophaus attack and put answering further questions on hold. Last week, they provided a second set of answers and this week they provided a third.
Nothing in there is surprising, but it’s worth folks heading over and reading.
There are a couple useful things that I think are worth highlighting.
When discussing spamtraps and how Spamhaus handles the traps.

New top level domains

ICANN have signed agreements for four new top level domains, all internationalized domains from the 2o12 applications for new TLDs.
They are شبكة (“network” or maybe “web” in arabic), 游戏 (“game” in chinese), онлайн and сайт (“online” and “website” in russian).
It’ll take a while for the registries to ramp up their infrastructure, but you might start seeing domains registered in these TLDs as soon as Q1 of next year. Email in internationalized domains is still not really viable, but web pages with fully internationalized URLs certainly are, and they’re likely to get much more popular with these new TLDs.
Can your message composition and reputation monitoring infrastructure handle non-ascii URLs correctly? If not, you’ve got six months or so to start getting that in place.

Growing your list carefully

Karl Murray wrote a great set of recommendations for growing an email marketing list. I really can’t think of anything I would have said differently. Touching customers and getting contact information from them is great, but there are situations where this gets bad addresses. Too many bad addresses can impact delivery.
So how do you grow your list without falling into a delivery trap? The specific recommendations, as always, depend on your specific situation. But knowing how bad addresses get onto your list will allow you to implement mitigation strategies that actually work.

Sending mail to the wrong person, part eleventy

Another person has written another blog post talking about their experiences with an email address a lot of people add to mailing lists without actually owning the email address. In this case the address isn’t a person’s name, but is rather just what happens when you type across rows on they keyboard.
These are similar suggestions to those I (and others) have made in the past. It all boils down to allow people who never signed up for your list, even if someone gave you their email address, to tell you ‘This isn’t me.” A simple link in the mail, and a process to stop all mail to that address (and confirm it is true if someone tries to give it to you again), will stop a lot of unwanted and unasked for email.

Barracuda filters clicking all links

Earlier this month I mentioned that a number of people were seeing issues with multiple links in emails being clicked by Barracuda filters. I invited readers to contact me and provide me with any information or evidence they had. Not only did a number of senders contact me, but one of the support reps at Barracuda also contacted me.
At issue is a part of the Barracuda email filter call the intent filter. There are 3 different modules to this filter.

The death of IP based reputation

Back in the dark ages of email delivery the only thing that really mattered to get your email into the inbox was having a good IP reputation. If your IP sent good mail most of the time, then that mail got into the inbox and all was well with the world. All that mattered was that good IP reputation. Even better for the people who wanted to game the system and get their spam into the inbox, there were many ways to get around IP reputation.
Every time the ISPs and spam filtering companies would work out a way to block spam using IP addresses, spammers would figure out a way around the problem. ISPs started blocking IPs so spammers moved to open relays. Filters started blocking open relays, so spammers moved to open proxies. Filters started blocking mail open proxies so spammers created botnets. Filters started blocking botnets, so spammers started stealing IP reputation by compromising ESP and ISP user accounts. Filters were constantly playing catchup with the next new method of getting a good IP reputation, while still sending spam.
While spammers were adapting and subverting IP based filtering a number of other things were happening. Many smart people in the email space were looking at improving authentication technology. SPF was the beginning, but problems with SPF led to Domains Keys and DKIM. Now we’re even seeing protocols (DMARC) layered on top of DKIM. Additionally, the price of data storage and processing got cheaper and data mining software got better.
The improvement in processing power, data mining and data storage made it actually feasible for ISPs and filtering companies to analyze content at standard email delivery speeds. Since all IPv4 addresses are now allocated, most companies are planning for mail services to migrate to IPv6. There are too many IPv6 IPss to rely on IP reputation for delivery decisions.
What this means is that in the modern email filtering system, IPs are only a portion of the information filters look at when making delivery decisions. Now, filters look at the overall content of the email, including images and URLs. Many filters are even following URLs to confirm the landing pages aren’t hosting malicious software, or isn’t content that’s been blocked before. Some filters are looking at DNS entries like nameservers and seeing if those nameservers are associated with bad mail. That’s even before we get to the user feedback, in the form of “this is spam” or “this is not spam” clicks, which now seem to affect both content, domain and IP reputation.
I don’t expect IP reputation to become a complete non-issue. I think it’s still valuable data for ISPs and filters to evaluate as part of the delivery decision process. That being said, IP reputation is so much less a guiding factor in good email delivery than it was 3 or 4 years ago. Just having an IP with a great reputation is not sufficient for inbox delivery. You have to have a good IP reputation and good content and good URLs.
Anyone who wants good email delivery should consider their IP reputation, but only as one piece of the delivery strategy. Focusing on a great IP reputation will not guarantee good inbox delivery. Look at the whole program, not just a small part of it.