Over the last few years I’ve reduced the complaints I send to ESPs about their customers to almost nothing. The only companies I send complaints to are ones where I actually know folks inside the compliance desk, and I almost never expect action, I just send them as professional courtesy. The sad fact is, many ESPs are really horrible about dealing with spam coming from their networks. The...
A number of folks in the sender space are reporting intermittent “This link may be suspicious” warnings on their emails. I first heard about it a few weeks ago from some clients. One wasn’t sure what was going on, the other found a bunch of malware uploaded into their customer accounts. At least 3 people have mentioned it today. One of them asked on Mailop, and the couple Google...
Back in 2017 Techdirt wrote a series of articles about Shiva Ayyadura. Shiva claims he invented email. (narrator voice: he didn’t). I wrote about the lawsuit when it was dismissed on First Amendment grounds. The parties cross appealed, and have been in settlement talks for 18 months. According to Techdirt, the non-monetary settlement they agreed to is that all the articles in dispute will...
Increasingly over the last few months I’ve been seeing questions from folks struggling with reputation at Gmail and inbox delivery. It seems like everything exploded in the beginning for 2019 and everything changed. I’ve been avoiding blaming it all on TensorFlow, but maybe the addition of the new ML engine really did fundamentally change how things were working at gmail. What folks...
Recently, a significant majority of discussions of email delivery problems mention that neither the IPs or domains in use are on any of the public blocklists. I was thinking about this recently and realised that, sometime in the past, I stopped using blocklists as a source of useful information about reputation. I’m not even sure exactly when it happened. I just stopped checking most of the...
Return Path acquired by Validity
There’s an ongoing discussion, one I normally avoid, regarding how much impact an ESP has on deliverability. Overall, my opinion is that as long as you have a half way decent ESP they have no impact on deliverability. Then I started writing an email and realised that my thoughts are more complex than that. Here are some excerpts from the email, because in other circumstances I would have...
The Commission finds that nCrowd, Inc. committed one violation of paragraph 6(1)(a) and one violation of paragraph 6(2)(c) of Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (the Act) in relation to commercial electronic messages sent to recipients in Canada. The Commission also finds that Brian Conley is liable, under section 31 of the Act, for those violations. Accordingly, the Commission imposes an...
One of the fascinating parts of my job is seeing how different groups in email have radically disparate points of view. A current example is how much value senders put on spamtraps compared to ISPs and filtering companies. I understand why this is. In all too many cases, when a sender asks why they’re mail is going to bulk or being blocked, the answer is “you’re hitting...
The US CAN-SPAM act is the primary US legislation covering commercial email. It’s been around since 2003, but I still see a steady stream of questions about it, and the folkloric answers to some of them are all over the place. What does CAN-SPAM require? The important requirements are Don’t use false or misleading header information Don’t use deceptive subject lines Make it...
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