We’re officially halfway through 2016, and looking forward to a slightly less hectic month around here. I hope you’re enjoying your summer (or winter, for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere). Our first June blog post marked the fifteen year anniversary of the very first anti-spam conference, SpamCon. As I noted, many of the people at that conference are still working in the...
I was going to say something about the issue with Hillary Clinton using an email server provided by her own staff for some of her email traffic, rather than one provided by her employer, but @LaneWinree already wrote pretty much what I’d have written, just better than I would have done. So, I guarantee this is exactly how the email server thing went down. Whatever internal system the...
There seems to have been an uptick in the number of folks harvesting addresses from their LinkedIn contacts and adding them to mailing lists. I’ve been seeing this in my own mailbox. I’m getting added to different lists and because I used a tagged address I know these folks are harvesting from LinkedIn. This behavior is really rude. Just because someone accepted your contact request...
It’s time once again for news organizations to pay attention to spam filters. This happens sometimes. Intrepid news organizations breathlessly report on how a particular ISP is blocking mail from a certain political figure our organization. I’ve written about political and activist lists being blocked or filtered before. Some of these posts are from the very early days of the blog...
It’s a wild election season here in the US. In the past few presidential elections, email has played a bigger and bigger role in messaging and fundraising. President Obama’s campaign used email effectively, but sent huge volumes. In fact, the volume was so heavy, it led to a joke on the Daily Show. (Video: email question at the 5:56 mark) Jon Stewart: “We have been talking here for...
Sometimes I find it hard to find a new topic to write about. I decide I’m going to write about X and then realize I did, often more than once. Other times I think I can blog about some issue only to realize that it’s too complex to handle in a quick post. There are concepts or issues that need background or I have to work a little harder to explain them. One thing I haven’t...
We run a lot of our own infrastructure at Word to the Wise. Our email and web presence runs on our own hardware, in our own cabinet in our own network space. Partly that’s because we’re all from very technical backgrounds, and can run them in a way that’s better suited to our needs than an off-the-shelf web service. Partly it’s so we can do things like add instrumentation...
An email I received this morning got me thinking about how your domain name is one of the main ways you identify yourself if you’re sending email. We talk about domain reputation quite a lot – DKIM and SPF let a sender volunteer a domain name as a unique identifier for recipients to use to track reputation, DMARC allows them to tie that domain to the domain visible to the user in the...
Al over at SpamResource reports that the next generation of Apple’s iOS has support for the list unsubscribe header.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time an independent email client has built in support for the List-Unsubscribe header. Microsoft and Google support it, but only in their webmail system. Hopefully other mail clients will follow suit.
A question came up on a recent deliverability panel about role accounts. What is a role account? A role account is an email address that goes to a particular role or position rather than to a person. In many cases email to that address gets sent to a ticketing system or sent to multiple people. Sometimes the address does go to a single person. The point of role accounts is to have standardized...
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