Recent Posts

What SPF records should you publish?

When it comes to SPF records there seems to be a lot of confusion. I mean, a decade after I posted it Authenticating SPF is still the most frequently visited post on the site. And, of course, there are hundreds of other pages out there that discuss SPF and what to publish. Still, there are common questions.

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Undelivered mail without a bounce

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post focusing on one small part of bounce handling. Today I want to talk about delivery failures that aren’t bounces. This is really the biggest issue for companies who have written their own bulk sending servers. Modern bulk MTA appliances and ESPs correctly handle these types of bounces. However, when you’re troubleshooting it’s important to know that sometimes there won’t be a SMTP level bounce.

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One subscription should equal one unsubscription

One of the side effects of using tagged addresses to sign up for things is seeing exactly what companies do with your data once they get it.

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Spamtraps on the brain

I really dislike whomever it was that coined the term pristine spamtraps. I get what they were trying to do, explain the different kinds of spamtraps and how different traps get on your list in different ways. Except… any type of trap can end up on your list in any way.

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Recycled spamtraps

Spamtraps strike fear into the heart of senders. They’ve turned into this monster metric that can make or break a marketing program. They’ve become a measure and a goal and I think some senders put way too much emphasis on spamtraps instead of worrying about their overall data accuracy.

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Filters working as intended

One of the toughest deliverability problems to deal with is when mail is blocked or going to spam because the filters are working as intended. Often the underlying issue is a lack of permission.

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B2B mail and compliance failures

This morning I got an email to a tagged address. The tag matched the company so it’s very likely I did actually sign up. Digging back through my mailbox, I see one previous email to that account – back in 2008.

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Gradual DMARC Rollout

Over on twitter Alwin de Bruin corrected me on an aspect of DMARC soft rollout I’d entirely forgotten about. It’s useful, so I thought I’d write a quick post about it.

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First major GDPR fine

Only now I realize there should have been a pool around GDPR enforcement. We could have placed bets on the first company fined, the first country to fine, over/under on the fine amount, month and year of action. But, it’s too late, all bets are closed, we have our first action.

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Recycled addresses, spamtraps and sensors

A few hours ago I was reading an ESP blog post that recommended removing addresses after they were inactive for a year because the address could turn into a spamtrap.  That is not how addresses turn into spamtraps and not why we want to remove active addresses. Moreover, it demonstrates a deep misunderstanding of spamtraps. Unfortunately, there are a lot of myths and misunderstandings of spamtraps in general.

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