I saw a post over on LinkedIn today. It was from an ESP, talking about their simple tips and tricks for getting into the inbox. The laughable bit was half the “tricks” had nothing to do with getting to the inbox, but rather were about enticing people to open the mail once it’s gotten to the inbox. There are no “tricks” to getting to the inbox. There used to be some...
One thing that catches me up with clients sometimes is their own spam filters block their own content. It happens. In some cases the client is using an appliance. The client’s reputation is bad enough that the appliance actually blocks mail. Often these clients have no idea they are blocking their own mail, until we try and send them something and the mail is rejected. Typically, the issue...
I had a bit of a interesting Friday. I was so glad it was finally the weekend. Saturday we did a bunch of errands, including go visit our servers. See, we’ve been upgrading infrastructure to implement a second type of backup system. Saturday we were doing the last set of upgrades so we could install over the weekend. Yes, we do all our own networking and racking. Saturday evening Steve is...
Yesterday, after 5pm, I was so happy. I was telling folks to have a great weekend. To take time off and relax. Have fun! Don’t work! Enjoy the weather! Then someone pointed out it was only Thursday. But! I got up this morning and got lots of happy Facebook notifications from friends about how TODAY was Friday. I was ready to have an awesome and productive day and go into the weekend with a...
I was looking for some references today back in old blog posts. This means I discover some old links are dead, blog posts are gone or moved, and information is lost. In this case it’s a post by J.D. Falk on deliverability.com. The link is dead (it looks like the whole website is dead), but I found a copy of his post and am reproducing it here. I don’t have permission, because I...
Last month I did an interview with Podbox about email, deliverability and how I became an email expert (breaking things, lots of breaking things… and having to pick up the pieces and fix them…) Check out the interview over on their website. I’ve been thinking a lot about history and longevity. Next year will mark 10 years of the Word to the Wise blog and 20 years of me entering...
I had the privilege to be a part of two panels at EEC16, with some of the best folks in the business. The first panel was “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Deliverability, but Were Afraid to Ask.” We had a lot of great audience questions. The first question, which was awesome (and I don’t think planted) was: “What is the most important thing we can do to improve...
Last week I posted a link to an article discussing how Gmail builds defenses to protect their users from malicious mail. One of the things I found very interesting in that article was the discussion about how Gmail deploys many changes at once, to prevent people from figuring out what the change was. Let’s take a look at what Gmail said. Make it hard for attackers to understand your...
Dear Laura, I’m a little confused by the term “no auth / no entry”. Gmail and other major receivers seem to be moving towards requiring authentication before they’ll even consider delivery. Does this just mean SPF and DKIM, or does this mean the much more stringent DMARC, as well? Thanks, No Shirt, No Shoes, No What Now? Shirtless & Shoeless, “No auth / no entry” is...
One of the questions we received during the EEC16 closing keynote panel was why isn’t there a single blocklist that everyone uses and why don’t ISPs share data more. It would be so much easier for senders if every ISP handled mail the same as every other. But the world isn’t that simple, and it’s not always clear which mail stream is spam and which is good mail. There were...
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