We took a quick trip to Dublin last week. I had every intention of blogging while on the trip, but… oops. I did get to meet with some clients, and had a great dinner while discussing email and delivery. Coming back, I see a lot of folks still reporting delivery problems to Microsoft properties. I’ve been operating under the assumption this was temporary as kinks were worked out after...
AOL Changes
We’ve known for a while that AOL email infrastructure is going to be merging with Yahoo’s, but apparently it’s happening sooner than anyone expected. The MXes for aol.com will be migrated to Yahoo infrastructure around February 1st. Reading between the lines I expect that this isn’t a flag day, and much of the rest of the AOL email infrastructure will be in use for a while...
Tempo
When we say that you might just be sending too much email and fatiguing or annoying the recipient into unsubscribing or hitting spam, this is the sort of thing we mean. Three emails (to the same email address) in four minutes might be a bit much. If you can’t combine the content you want to send into a single personalized email, maybe spread deliveries out a bit? Or even not send all of it...
Filters evolving
I started writing this blog post while sitting on a conference call with a bunch of senders discussing some industry wide problems folks are having with delivery. Of course the issue of Microsoft comes up. A lot of senders are struggling with reaching the inbox there and no one has any real, clear guidance on how to resolve it. And the MS employees who regularly answer questions and help folks...
That's not how you do it…
Got an email this morning from a company advertising their newest webinar “The Two Pillars of Effective Large-Scale Email: Security and Deliverability.” The message came to a tagged address, so clearly I’d given them one at some point. But I didn’t recognize the name or company or anything. I did a search to seen when I may have interacted with this company in the past...
Oh, Microsoft
Things have been a little unsettled at Microsoft webmail properties over the last few months. A number of ESPs reported significantly increased deferrals from Microsoft properties starting sometime late in November. Others saw reduced open rates across their customer base starting in late October. More recently, people are noticing higher complaint rates as well as an increase in mail being...
That Should Be A Word
What … is your name?
For some reason otherwise legitimate ESPs have over the years picked up a habit of obfuscating who they are. I don’t mean those cases where they use a customers subdomain for their infrastructure or bounce address. If the customer is Harper Collins then mail “from” @bounce.e.harpercollins.com sent from a server claiming to be mail3871.e.harpercollins.com isn’t unreasonable...
Meltdown & Spectre, Oh My
If you follow any infosec sources you’ve probably already heard a lot about Meltdown and Spectre, Kaiser and KPTI. If not, you’ve probably seen headlines like Major flaw in millions of Intel chips revealed or Intel sells off for a second day as massive security exploit shakes the stock. What is it? These are all about a cluster of related security issues that exploit features shared...
Google makes connections
One of the client projects I’m working on includes doing a lot of research on MXs, including some classification work. Part of the work involves identifying the company running the MX. Many of the times this is obvious; mail.protection.outlook.com is office365, for instance. There are other cases where the connection between the MX and the host company is not as obvious. That’s where...