Recent Posts

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.

Mailbox providers

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

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.

Targets and measures

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.