I was on the phone with a colleague recently. They were talking about collecting a bit of data over the weekend and mentioned how great it was they had the tools to be able to do this. Coincidentally, another colleague mentioned that when the subscription bombing happened they were able to react quickly because they had a decent tool chain. I’ve also been working with some clients who are...
Captchas – those twisty distorted words you have to decipher and type in to access a website – have been around since the 1990s. Their original purpose was to tell the difference between a human user and an automated system, by requiring the user to answer a challenge – one that was supposedly hard for computers to solve, but easy for humans. A few years later they acquired the...
Much of the current deliverability advice focuses on a few key ideas: Authenticate your mail with SPF, DKIM and DMARC Use a dedicated IP. Monitor delivery. Clean your data. All of these things are absolutely things you should be doing, but senders can do all these things and still have cruddy delivery. These things are great and can help your mail deliver better. But they’re not enough to...
There are probably hundreds of thousands of really awesome SaaS products out there. They provide a framework to do all sorts of stuff that used to be really hard to do. Almost all of them include some email component. They dutifully build the email piece into their platform and, because they’re smart, they outsource the actual sending to one of SMTP providers. They’re happy, their...
Marketers have a thing about transactional mail. In the US, transactional mail is exempt from many of the CAN SPAM regulations. If they label a mail transactional, then they can send it even when the recipient has opted-out! The smart marketer looks for opportunities to send transactional mail so they can bother spam get their brand in front of people who’ve opted out. Enter the...
The MAAWG conference was held in Brooklyn a few weeks ago. Many positive discussions and sessions happened at the conference. But there was an incident of harassment during the conference where one participant assaulted multiple other attendees during late evening activities. I’m not going to speak too much to what happened as I wasn’t there. What I will say is that I am proud of my...
I wear a number of hats and have a lot of different email addresses. I like to keep the different email addresses separate from each other, “don’t cross the streams” as it were. Recently I’ve been getting spam to my womenofemail.org address asking about the wordtothewise.com website. I’m not sure where Ms. Catherine Metcalf bought my Women of Email address or...
A few days ago Laura noticed a bug in one of our in-house tools – it was sometimes marking an email as SPF Neutral when it should have been a valid SPF pass. I got around to debugging it today and traced it back to a bug in the Go standard library. A DNS TXT record seems pretty simple. You lookup a hostname, you get some strings back. Those strings can be used for all sorts of things, but...
One of the consequences of moving to Ireland is I’m unsubscribing from most commercial mail, including some lists I’ve been on for a decade or more. Sadly, many of the companies don’t ship to Ireland, or their shipping costs are prohibitively expensive. Even if I wanted to purchase from them, I couldn’t. This process has made me realise how horrible many company’s...
Over the last few months I’ve gotten an increasing number of questions about the Spamhaus DBL. So it’s probably time to do a blog post about it. Last year I wrote about the DBL: DBL is the Domain Block List. It lists domains and not IP addresses. I’ll be honest, I don’t have as much experience with the DBL as with other lists, but I have had a few clients on the DBL. DBL is tied into...
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