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Mailbox providers

The other day I tweeted that I often used the term “receivers” to describe receiving MTAs. Whenever I use the term “receivers” to discuss email filters, I think of JD and Madkins telling me that receivers send mail, too. And they do. But I haven’t found a better term for “groups that receive and filter lots of mail.” #deliverability #emailgeek — Laura Atkins (@wise_laura)...

Reputation is in the eye of the beholder

A few years ago reputation was generally recognised as one thing. If a sending reputation or IP reputation was good in one place it was likely good in other places. Different entities mostly reputation using the same set of signals albeit slightly tweaked to meet their own needs. More recently there is a divergence in how reputation is measured, meaning delivery can be vastly different across...

Targets and measures

Over the past few years a number of email delivery products have been launched. Many of these products are intended to improve deliverability by improving metrics. The problem is they don’t work the way their purchasers thing. Take data hygiene services. For the most part, these services take a list of email addresses, do data analysis and magic and then return a “clean” list to...

It’s a new year, do you know what your filters are doing?

Yesterday the NJABL domain expired. The list was disabled back in 2013 but the domain continued to be maintained as a live domain. With the expiration, it was picked up by domain squatters and is now listing everything. Steve wrote about how and why expired blocklist domains list the world last year. The short version is, that when domain squatters grab a domain they put in a DNS entry that...

Welcome 2019

It’s the beginning of a new year and everyone is breaking out posts either reviewing the previous year or making predictions for the next year. I’ve done both over the years. 2018 brought us a couple major things in email. The biggest change was the European General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) came into effect in May. The regulation date drove huge volumes of email throughout...

Temporary fixes

If your mail goes back to spam within a month of “fixing” a delivery problem, then you never really fixed the problem. You just evaded filters for a short time. The filters caught up and the problem is definitely your mail.
 

Gmail tab weirdness

Lots of reports today about mail being delivered to unusual tabs today. Mail that normally goes to promotions is in updates, updates are in the inbox, things like that.
It’s not just you.
Update: The Washington Post reported on the bug.

Whois silliness from Tucows

In the wake of GDPR, public whois records are 100% redacted. There is lots of work going on to attempt to provide the data without violating privacy laws, but no one is there yet. This came up because today I got email from Tucows asking  me to verify and, if necessary, update my whois data. Now, Tucows is the registrar, so they know all of the data. But they sent me thisGee, thanks. That’s...

Never 100% inbox

No matter how great an email program deliverability is, no one can guarantee that 100% of the email sent will reach the recipient’s inbox. Why? Recipients can make decisions about where mail goes in their own inbox. Every mail client has a way for users to control where mail is delivered. This is good for delivery, when the mail means so much to people that they override spam filters and...

Thinking about the concept of best practices

In 2010 Chad White declared best practices dead. Frankly, the term has always been too “big tent” to be truly useful. When “don’t buy email lists” and “use buttons for primary calls-to-action” are both best practices, it’s no wonder there’s confusion. What we need is new language that differentiates those practices that are a litmus test for...

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