Recent Posts

It’s the email time of year…

I’m basically waiting for the various ESPs to announce Just How Much Mail they’ve sent over the last 4 days. Early information from one ESP shows a hefty percentage over the amount they sent last year, and that amount had many, many, many zeros in it.

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There’s something about bounces

I’ve shared a version of this image repeatedly. I think it was only my Facebook friends that got the stick figure screaming in frustration, though.

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Phishing evolves beyond DMARC

The phishing attack against Sendgrid is still going on. Most of the mail and the websites are being hosted on Linode. I’ve still not gotten to see what one of the sites looks like, as Linode is getting the sites down before I click on the links.

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Alt-text and phishing warnings

For a long time one of the “best practices” for links in html content has been to avoid having anything that looks like a URL or hostname in the visible content of the link, as ISP phishing filters are very, very suspicious of links that seem to mislead recipients about where the link goes to. They’re a very common pattern in phishing emails.

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Myths about spamtraps

The nice folks at Kickbox asked me what I thought the biggest myths about spamtraps were. I said:

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The internet is different in the EU

One of the interesting things about moving to the EU is experiencing the internet where GDPR is a thing. We get asked permission for everything. Including if we want shopping cart updates.

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ESP being phished is a Black Friday cataclysm

There is currently a phishing attack against a major ESP. The mail came through what I presume was a compromised account hosted at one of the providers. It’s just as possible this was a domain set up for the sole purpose of phishing, though.

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CAN SPAM says I can!

the word spam with a checkmark next to it.

Saw a new disclaimer on mail sent to an address harvested off our website today:

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Identifying domains that don’t accept or send email

A couple folks have asked me recently about MX records that they don’t understand. These records consist of a single . or they contain localhost or they are 127.0.0.1.

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Mentally modelling filters

When we talk about filters, we often think there is one filter. But, in many cases there are multiple stages of filters, each examining mail in a different way.

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