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Twilio acquires Sendgrid

Woke up this morning to the news that Sendgrid has been acquired by Twilio in an all stock deal. This fills a gap in Twilio’s platform, they didn’t seem to have any email capability before. I’m wondering how this will shake out in the broader email industry. Sendgrid is one of the biggest providers of SMTP services and have a significant customer base. I’ve worked with a...

Good morning DMARC

I’m thinking I may need to deploy DMARC report automation sooner rather than later.

… and so on, and on, and on for a lot further down the mailbox.

Company responsibility and compliance

I blogged a few times recently about Zoho and their issues with malicious actors abusing their platform. They asked me to post the following statement from their CEO Sridhar Vembu. Unfortunately phishing has become one of the bad side-effects of Zoho’s rapid growth over the last couple of years, especially the growth of our mail service. Since Zoho Mail offers the most generous free...

2018 JD Falk Award … a mailing list

It’s M3AAWG time. Even though we’re not there, I’m getting regular updates from friends and colleagues who are there. Yesterday, was the presentation of the 2018 JD Falk award. The award recognises “a particularly meritorious project undertaken by a dedicated individual or group reflecting the spirit of volunteerism and community building.” In this case, the award...

Fun with spam filters

I recently had a challenging travel experience in the Netherlands, trying to get from Schipol airport to a conference I was speaking at. As part of my attempt to get out of the airport, I installed UBER on my phone. There were some challenges with getting UBER to authorise my phone number, so I tried linking it to my Gmail account. I checked Gmail today and noticed there was a message from UBER...

All filters are not equal

Many questions about delivery problems often assume that there is one standard email filter and the rules are the same across all of them. Unfortunately, this isn’t really the case. The biggest divide is consumer versus business filters. Business filters don’t really care about things like engagement. A sender could have near perfect engagement with a message to a business. But a...

DNS Flag Day

There are quite a lot of broken DNS servers out there. I’m sure that’s no surprise to you, but some of them might be yours. And you might not notice that until your domains stop working early next year. DNS is quite an old protocol, and when it was originally specified there wasn’t really a good way to extend the protocol to add new features. That was fixed about 19 years ago...

Zoho, phishing and who’s next?

ZDnet reports that Zoho’s problems with phishing aren’t over. Their report states that Zoho is being used as a pipeline to exfiltrate data from phished accounts. The software platform’s email address service, on both zoho.com and zoho.eu domains, is being exploited in 40 percent of phishing campaigns in which email “is the primary exfiltration vehicle.” That’s...

Schroedinger’s email

The riskiest email to send is that very first email. It’s a blank slate. Even if you’re sending confirmation messages, you don’t really know anything about how this email is going to affect your reputation. It’s Schroedinger’s email. The address is both good and bad, until you send to it. If it’s good, great things will happen. You’ll be happy. The...

Evolution of policy

Last week, I talked about policy, using some different blocklist policies as examples. In that post I talked about how important it is that policy evolve. One example of that is how we’ve been evolving policy related to companies that get listed on Purchased Lists and ESPs. Who is listed has evolved over time, and we’re actually looking at some policy changes right now. Listing policy...

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