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Four things to check before your next mailing

Like many bits of technology, email is often set-and-forget. Everything is checked and rechecked during setup, and then no one goes back and looks at it again. But mail programs are not static, and people make changes. These changes don’t really break things, but over time they can create their own set of problems. Setting aside some time every quarter or even every year to check and make...

April 2015: The Month in Email

We started the month with some conversations about best practices, both generally looking at the sort of best practices people follow (or don’t) as well as some specific practices we wanted to look at in more depth. Three for this month: Be gracious with opt-out requests. Email marketing is hard. Even when it’s successful, response rates can be very low. It is surely frustrating to hear from...

Office365/EOP and Outlook.com/Hotmail will converge

Terry Zink posted two informative blog posts recently, the first being the change to unauthenticated mail sent over IPv6 to EOP and the second post about EOP (Office365 and Exchange Hosting) and Outlook.com/Hotmail infrastructure converging. Exchange Online Protection (EOP) is the filtering system in place for Office 365 and hosted Exchange customers. Outlook.com/Hotmail utilized its own mail...

Email verification services

Just yesterday a group of delivery folks were discussing email verification services over IRC. We were talking about the pros and cons, when we’d suggest using them, when we wouldn’t, which ones we’ve worked with and what our experiences have been. I’ve been contemplating writing up some of my thoughts about verification services but it’s a post I wanted to spend...

Political Fraud & Spam

The Conservative Party is one of the largest political parties in the UK. They’re center-right politically (by European standards), nationalist and pro-business. You’ll often see them called the Tory party or Tories – a pejorative nickname they acquired 350 years ago. While they’re part of the ruling coalition today, there’s a general election coming up in the next...

Compromises and phishing and email

Earlier this month, Sendgrid reported that a customer account was compromised and used for phishing. At the time Sendgrid thought that it was only a single compromise. However, they did undertake a full investigation to make sure that their systems were secure. Today they released more information about the compromise. It wasn’t simply a customer account, a Sendgrid employee’s...

Office365/EOP IPv6 changes starting today

Terry Zink at Microsoft posted earlier this week that Office365/Exchange Online Protection will have a significant change this week. Office365 uses Exchange Online Protection (EOP) for spam filtering and email protection. One of the requirements to send to EOP over IPv6 is to have the email authenticated with either SPF or DKIM.  If the mail sent to Office365/EOP over IPv6 is not authenticated...

Authentication and Repudiation

Email Authentication lets you demonstrate that you sent a particular email. Email Repudiation is a claim that you didn’t send a particular email.   SPF is only for email authentication1 DKIM is only for email authentication DMARC is only for email repudiation   1 SPF was originally intended to provide repudiation, but it didn’t work reliably enough to be useful. Nobody uses...

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