Recent Posts

Automated link checking getting more sophisticated

As the volume and severity of malicious email increases, filters are increasingly following links in emails. This is really nothing new. Barracuda and other filters have been inspecting links automatically for years. From what I’ve seen there does seem to be some level of risk analysis based on domain reputation. That makes sense, not only is following links computationally expensive, it can also delay mail receipt.

Read More

What’s a suspicious domain?

The question came up on slack and I started bullet pointing what would make a domain suspicious. Seemed like a reasonable blog post. In no particular order, some features that make a domain suspicious to spam filters.

Read More

Yeah… don’t do that

Never add someone to a mailing list without giving them a heads up that you’re doing it. It’s just uncool and rude. For example, I have been contacting some vendors about some work we need done. One of them has yet to answer my inquiry, but has already added me to their newsletter. Even worse, I had no idea submitting a form asking about their services would get me on their mailing list.

Read More

How much has changed and will change

I was on a call with a client today and they wanted to talk about the handshake agreement about bounce handling I mentioned last week. As I started to really talk about it, I realised how much has changed in the years since that meeting. 

Read More

What’s a bounce?

Bounces and bounce handling is one of those topics I’ve avoided writing about for a long time. Part of my avoidance is because there are decades of confusing terminology that hasn’t ever been really defined. Untangling that terminology is the first step to being able to talk sensibly about what to do. Instead of writing a giant long post, I can break it into smaller, more focused posts.

Read More

How accurate are reports?

One of the big topics of discussion in various deliverability circles is the problems many places are seeing with delivery to Microsoft properties. One of the challenges is that Microsoft seems to be happy with how their filters are working, while senders are seeing vastly different data. I started thinking about reporting, how we generate reports and how do we know the reports are correct.

Read More

Mailbox providers

The other day I tweeted that I often used the term “receivers” to describe receiving MTAs.

Read More

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 entities.

Read More

Targets and measures

Read More

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.

Read More
Categories
Tags