A bit of a refresh of a post from 2011: Six best practices for every mailer. I still think best practices are primarily technical and that how senders present themselves to recipients is more about messaging and branding than best practices. These 6 best practices from 2011 are no longer best, these days, they’re the absolute minimum practices for senders. If you can’t manage to do...
A DMARC warning
One challenge when implementing DMARC is to ensure that all mail, and I do mean ALL mail is authenticated correctly, before switching to a p=reject notice. The easiest way to do this is to set up a p=none record and check reports to see what mail isn’t authenticated. At least some of this mail is actually going to be valid but unauthenticated email. I regularly recommend monitoring for 6...
Way to go Equifax
Earlier this month I wrote about how we can’t trust Equifax with our personal data. I’m not sure we can trust them with a cotton ball. Today, we discover Equifax has been sending consumers worried about their personal information leaking to the wrong site. [O]n multiple occasions over the span of weeks, the company’s official Twitter account responded to customer inquiries by...
Microsoft changes
There’s been quite a bit of breakage and delivery failure to various Microsoft domains this month. It started with them changing the MX for hotmail.co.uk, then the MX for hotmail.fr… and both these things seem to have broken mail. I also saw a report this morning that some of the new MXs have TLS certificates that don’t match the hostnames. What’s going on? Historically...
Thinking about deliverability
I was chatting with folks over on one of the email slack channels today. The discussion was about an ESP not wanting to implement a particular change as it would hurt deliverability. It led me down a path of thinking about how we think of deliverability and how that informs how we approach email. The biggest problem I see is the black and white thinking. There’s an underlying belief in the...
About those degrees…
There is a meme going around related to the Equifax hack that points out an executive in charge of security doesn’t have a degree related to security. Surprise! A lot of the folks who currently keep us safe on the internet don’t have degrees in security. They just didn’t exist when we were in school. I think Paul summed it up best: [T]alking about Susan Mauldin’s music degree is...
Targeted advertising
A friend posted a link in IRC pointing at a couch at Wayfair.com. Now I have Wayfair.com ads following me around the internet.
ProPublica wrote an article about how Facebook lets advertisers micro target “jew haters” and other hate groups.
I received this postcard in the mail.
Targeted Advertising.
August 2017: The month in email
Hello! Hope all are keeping safe through Harvey, Irma, Katia and the aftermath. I know many people that have been affected and are currently out of their homes. I am proud to see so many of my fellow deliverability folks are helping our displaced colleagues with resources, places to stay and money to replace damaged property. Here’s a mid-month late wrapup of our August blog posts. Our favorite...
Google Postmaster bad IP reputation
There are widespread reports this morning (9/11/17) that Google postmaster tools is showing bad IP reputation for IPs starting on 9/9. This issue is affecting just about everyone. Looking through my client’s postmaster pages, I’m seeing red for IP reputation on every client. Even my clients with generally good reputation are seeing bad reputation since 9/9. This looks like a...
What's going on with your SBL listing?
This popped up on my Facebook memories this morning. I don’t post about client events very often, but given I can’t remember even what client this is, I don’t think I’m revealing too much info. FB memory from a few years ago. I’m dealing with a client who has a pretty big SBL listing. They’re going through a lot of contortions to fix the problems the SBL is...