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Link roundup June 18, 2010

Hotmail has released a new version of their software with some changes. Return Path discusses the changes in depth, but there are a couple that senders may find helpful.

There’s been a bit of court activity related to spam that others have written about and I feel need a mention. I’ve not yet read the papers fully, but hope to get a chance to fully digest them over the weekend.
First is e360 v. Spamhaus. This is the case that actually prompted me to start this blog and my first blog post analyzed the 7th circuit court ruling sending the case back the lower court to determine actual damages. The lower court ruled this week, lowering the judgment to $27,002 against Spamhaus. The judge ruled that there was actual tortuous interference on the part of Spamhaus. In my naive reading of the law, this strikes me as not only an incorrect ruling, but one that ignores previous court decisions affirming that blocklists are protected under Section 230. Venkat seems to agree with me.

The view from a blacklist operator

We run top-level DNS servers for several blacklists including the CBL, the blacklist of infected machines that the SpamHaus XBL is based on. We don’t run the CBL blacklist itself (so we aren’t the right people to contact about a CBL listing) we just run some of the DNS servers – but that means that we do get to see how many different ways people mess up their spam filter configurations.
This is what a valid CBL query looks like:

Basic email delivery using telnet

Whenever we’re working with someone to diagnose some obscure delivery issue one of the things we usually have them try is to “run a transaction by hand”. Being able to do that is a trick that everyone working with email should be able to do. I was drafting a blog post today and wanted to refer to running a transaction by hand and I realized that we hadn’t actually explained it anywhere. So here we are.
When you’re running a transaction by hand you’re doing everything your mailserver would do to deliver an email, but you’re doing it yourself. That means that you get to see all the responses from the mailserver you’re sending the mail to, and also any delays or errors in much more detail than you can usually get from mailserver delivery logs.
I want to send some email to playingwithtelnet@gmail.com. There are two main steps to doing this – first I need to find out which mailserver I need to talk to to send mail to gmail, then I need to actually send the mail.
To find the mailserver I have to look up the MX record for gmail.com. From a unix / linux / mac command prompt you can do that like this (the bits you type are in orange):

A short note

We had a catastrophic failure of our mail server over the weekend. We lost both drives and the server won’t boot past the BIOS stage. Most of the weekend was spent on recovery and restoration, and we expect to have mail restored today. In the meantime, if you need to get a hold of me I’m available on AIM as wttwlaura and can be reached at my gmail account: wttwlaura.
This does mean I have the opportunity *ahem* to re-organized mail and my mail handling work flow. What better time to move to zero inbox than now when I have to rebuild my sieve scripts from scratch?
UPDATE: mail is back and I can be reached at the normal places, including through our contact link.

My ISP might get blacklisted

The last of seven in our occasional series on why ESPs need, or don’t need, lots of IP addresses to send mail properly.

Domain Assurance by Return Path

As often happens during MAAWG, email companies are announcing new products. One of the interesting ones is the new Domain Assurance product from Return Path.

HTML in email

Steve and I were talking this afternoon about HTML in email. He wanted to know what headers I looked for in the HTML portion of an email. A good question, as I’ve seen everything from a full doctype declaration through to just <body> tags.. All of them seem to render OK in various mail clients so I don’t spend too much time worrying about the specific HTML header elements. I do look for invalid tags and comments, but I check those whether they are in the header or the body.
Those of you that design HTML emails, what are your experiences with headers? Are there specific HTML headers that you always include? Do you skip the header portion of the HTML document and just use body tags? How do you test? What do you think is important?

Who's sharing data

Al has a post asking what people would do if their information was shared after opting out of any sharing.
It’s a tough call and one I think about as I see mail coming to my mailbox to such addresses as laura-sony and laura-quicken and laura-datran. All of these were addresses given to specific companies and where I attempted to opt-out of them sharing my data with other companies. Somewhere along the line, though, the addresses leaked and got into the hands of spammers.
Those addresses are overwhelmed with spams and scams. The frustrating part is there is no way to fix it. Once the addresses are leaked, they’re leaked. They will be receiving spam throughout eternity, even if the companies involved stop selling data or fix their data handling problem.
I don’t know what to do, honestly. If I think it was a one time thing, such as the addresses that started getting spam after the iContact data leak, then I’ll change my address at the vendor and retire the address the spammers have. But with other vendors, I don’t know what happened and I suspect the vendor doesn’t either, and so I can either deal with the spam or hope that I don’t lose real mail from that vendor.
There’s no easy answer. Any time you hand over an email address, or any other form of personal data, you’re trusting in the company, all of their employees and all of their vendors and partners to be honest and competent. This is often not the case.
What do you do?

The rules of delivery success

Senders with delivery problems ask about “the rules.” “Just tell us what the rules are!” “If the ISPs would just tell us what to do we’d do it!” There is only one rule anyone needs to pay attention to for good mail delivery: Respect the recipient.
Not good enough for you? Want more specific rules? OK.
The two rules everyone must follow for good mail delivery.