Recent Posts

Rethinking public blocklists

• laura
• Industry

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.

Congratulations Return Path

• laura
• Industry

Return Path acquired by Validity

ESPs and deliverability

• laura
• Industry

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.

CRTC fines individual for company violations under CASL

• laura
• Industry , Legal

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 administrative monetary penalty of $100,000 on Brian Conley. CRTC

The commission’s report is well worth a read as it discusses many of the things I’ve noticed from spamming operations over the years. It’s pretty standard business practice for spammers to have a complex set of sorta but not really different businesses. They all interact and share data, but not legal liability. They’re mostly treated as one business by the principles and there’s no real dedication to any one brand name.

Spamtraps are overblown… by senders

• laura
• Faq

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.

CAN-SPAM Again

• steve
• Legal

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.

When marketing automation goes bad

• laura
• Industry

Friday I attempted to make a purchase online. I go through the selection and checkout process … up through the payment choices. When I pick pay by credit card I get an error message that says “credit card expiration date wrong.” All very strange because I’ve not put in a credit card number or expiration date.

Question of the day

• laura
• Uncategorized

Is 10,000 emails sent a few times a week a high enough volume to improve a Gmail reputation?

Gmail suddenly puts mail in the bulk folder

• laura
• Delivery improvement

One of the delivery challenges that regularly comes up in various delivery discussion spaces is the “Gmail suddenly put my mail in spam.” From my perspective, there is rarely a “suddenly” about Gmail’s decision making process.

TLS and Gmail delivery

• laura
• Industry

I’m seeing some questions about TLS and Gmail. Folks are seeing a correlation between sending without TLS and the mail going to bulk.