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December 3, 2014

November 2014 – the month in email

By laura

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03December

Over the years, we get many of the same questions again and again. This isn’t a complaint; it’s a useful opportunity for us to check in and see if the technologies, policies and best practices have evolved over time, or if our previous recommendations still stand. One example this month of something that has changed (the situation has improved a bit): Using URL shorteners and one that has not:...

December 2, 2014

Congestion at Verizon

By laura

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02December

Yahoo! finally found their broken cable (I had no idea Yahoo had fiber) and fixed it. Now, I’m seeing a lot of reports that Verizon is accepting mail very, very slowly. Some folks are reporting no more than 20 messages a minute. This could be due to congestion, and just an underpowered system, or it could be some purposeful throttling on Verizon’s end. In any case, this is affecting a...

December 1, 2014

Friendly email addresses

By steve

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01December

Most of the time when we’re talking about email addresses, we’re talking about the actual user@domain format that’s used to send mail over the wire, but that’s not how we most often see them. When they’re used in a To: or From: header they’re usually associated with a display name – the “real name” of the user with the associated email address...

November 25, 2014

My holiday email prediction

By laura

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25November

I was on IRC with a group of ESP delivery specialists last week and one of them was looking for something to blog about. I suggested a list of holiday predictions. Not that I have a huge number of holiday predictions, but I did come up with one. During the holiday season at least one retailer will decide that they have information so important that they will ignore my opt-0ut request and add me...

November 24, 2014

Yahoo problems

By laura

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24November

I’m seeing scattered reports today that a lot of places are seeing backed up queues to Yahoo. They’ve had some problems over the last few days and seem to be still recovering. It’s looking like it’s something internal to Yahoo. One set of error messages I’ve seen reported by numerous people is: “451 4.3.2 Internal error reading data.” It’s not you...

November 18, 2014

Changing the email client

By laura

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18November

We’re in the thick of hiring and next week is Thanksgiving, so blogging is going to be very light for the next two weeks. One thing I have noticed is that lately there are attempts to “change how people interact with email.” Google released their Inbox product. And today I saw a post about an IBM attempt to change email and how people use it as a tool. I find as I juggle more...

November 14, 2014

Cloud sending with Momentum from MessageSystems

By laura

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14November

Earlier this week MessageSystems announced a new cloud platform, SparkPost, letting smaller companies have access to the power of the MessageSystems’s Momentum platform. MessageSystems announced this at their user conference in San Diego. There was a lot of great information from ISPs and Momentum customers presented at the conference. If you get a chance check out the conference tweet...

November 13, 2014

STARTTLS and misplaced outrage

By steve

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13November

About a month ago someone posted a heavily elided screenshot that they claimed was evidence of their ISP, AT&T, sabotaging SMTP connections being sent over their network, meaning that anyone could sniff their passwords and traffic. This is it:     Most email people looking at that saw the asterisks in the banner and went “Oh. That’s not the ISP tampering with the...

November 11, 2014

Email problems are costly

By laura

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11November

Last week Zulily released their quarterly earnings. Their earnings’ report was disappointing, resulting in a drop in their stock prices. The chairman of the company told reporters on a conference call that part of the reason for the drop in earnings were due to deliverability problems “at a large ISP.” Zulily ran into problems with a large email provider — issues which resulted...

November 10, 2014

URL reputation and shorteners

By laura

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10November

A bit of  a throwback post from Steve a few years ago. The problem has gotten a little better as some shortening companies are actually disabling spammed URLs, and blocking URLs with problematic content. I still don’t recommend using a public URL shortener in email messages, though. Any time you put a URL in mail you send out, you’re sharing the reputation of everyone who uses URLs with...