Recent Posts

Effects of the Yahoo and Google Changes

In October 2023, Yahoo and Google announced new standards for sending bulk mail to their systems. For bulk senders these changes included requiring aligned authentication and publishing a DMARC record and complying with the List-Unsubscribe RFC. The ISPs also formally announced complaints must stay below a threshold of 0.3%. At the time of the announcement, they said enforcement would start in February 2024. As with many things, this enforcement deadline was pushed as ESPs explained the challenges to meet the deadlines.

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Stop using Entrust for your BIMI Certificates

In July I talked about how Entrust was mistrusted by, well, pretty much everyone due to a years long series of security and trust violations.

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Tracking link maths

galaxy

How long does a tracking link need to be?

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There’s text and then there’s text

If you want to send someone an email with some text in it there are quite a few different ways you can do it. The main differences are the ways the text is packaged up in MIME entities to be sent.

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Your bounce classification is a bit rubbish

When a mailbox provider rejects or defers an email it sends back a message explaining why.

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Do we care about SPF alignment?

SPF and DKIM are the two main ways we associate a domain name with a stream of email in an authenticated way. We can choose the DKIM signing domain fairly freely – we can choose any domain or subdomain we control and put it in the d= field of the DKIM signature. But our choice for the SPF domain is more constrained.

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Comparing DKIM keys

Sometimes we have a client who has done something wrong when setting up authentication. Their DKIM signing fails due to something being wrong with the public key they’ve published.

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The Future of Deliverability

There always seems to be appetite from folks to read the tea leaves and follow up with predictions about what the future holds. I mean, how many folks in the US are obsessively refreshing polls for the last few weeks? (American’s: don’t forget to vote on Tuesday!)

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No, Gmail did not just break all open tracking

I was avoiding commenting on the email open tracking bad take that seems to be going viral round the more gullible corners of LinkedIn.

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DNS Failures

We use DNS a lot in email, particularly for authentication, so diagnosing why DNS isn’t returning what we expect it to is a pretty common challenge. And DNS responses aren’t exactly the clearest thing to understand.

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