I’ve written before about how there is some (I’m sure lovely) woman in the UK who has been connected to my email address. I get a lot of mail for her. Mostly spam. She doesn’t seem to be using the address, but I regularly get mail addressed to MRS. LAURA CORBISHLEY (all caps, always). Typically these messages are advertising various UK stores and products. Sometimes...
Hurricane Electric had a significant outage of their authoritative DNS servers this morning, causing them to return valid responses with no results for all(?) queries. This will have caused delivery problems for any mail going to domains using HE.net DNS – which will include some of their colocation customers, as well as users of their free services – but also will have caused reverse...
I talked on Monday about the SPF rule of ten and how it made it difficult for companies to use multiple services that send email on their behalf. Today I’m going to look at how to fix things, by shrinking bloated SPF records. This is mostly aimed at those services who send email on their customers behalf and ask their customers to include an SPF record as that’s the biggest pain...
I mentioned yesterday that sometimes people and software screw up in ways that cause problems. Today I saw an article demonstrating just how bad these issues can be. Florida State University Housing Department sent detailed and confidential violation reports to tens of thousands of students. On Monday, March 14 at around 2 p.m., FSU first became aware that a glitch in the University Housing...
There are so many things that need to happen to make the Internet work. DNS entries need to be right. MXs need to be set up. Web servers need to be configured. And, let’s be honest, anyone who has ever run their own services on the Internet has flubbed a configuration. We don’t think about it, because most of the time the configurations are handled by scripts and they do things right...
Spamhaus gave a bunch of us a preview of their new “Top 10 worst” (or should that be bottom 10?) lists at M3AAWG. These lists have now been released to the public. The categories they’re measuring are: Countries Spam ISPs Spammers Botnet Countries Botnet ISPs Botnet ASNs TLDs Nothing really surprising there, but it’s nice to see the numbers. I have to wonder if the listing...
Some mechanisms and modifiers (collectively, “terms”) cause DNS queries at the time of evaluation, and some do not. The following terms cause DNS queries: the “include”, “a”, “mx”, “ptr”, and “exists” mechanisms, and the “redirect” modifier. SPF implementations MUST limit the total number of those terms to 10...
Dear Laura, We’re a small ESP and as we onboard new clients, we often hear them ask “Why did I get better open rates with our previous provider? There has to be something wrong with your platform!” As part of the onboarding process, we meet with new clients to provide best practices and let them know they are building a reputation with ISPs on new IPs. We talk about how algorithms are...
“All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.” Mutt is a commandline mail client that’s been in use and been actively developed for about two decades. It’s considered by many to be the most powerful mail client available, particularly for handling large volumes of email. It’s weaknesses include poor rich text handling and desktop integration for attachment...
It’s sometimes hard for me to keep up with what other people are saying and discussing about email marketing. I’ve been trying to be more active on LinkedIn, but there are just so many good marketing and delivery blogs out there I can’t keep up with all of them. Here are a couple interesting things I’ve read in the last week. Five Steps to Stay Out of the Spam Folder...
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