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The care and feeding of reputation

The next #letstalkdelivery session is Wednesday September 16 at 5pm. Invites went out today so if you signed up for our mailing list, you have the invite in your inbox. OK, if you’re on gmail it went to the promotions tab, but that’s OK, I’m promoting our call.

Let’s Talk: August vacation

These talks have been wildly successful and I am so excite to talk with all of you and discuss topics of deliverability. When I started them I thought there was some desire for peers to discuss delivery with one another. As they’ve evolved I realize they were not just open discussions but more formal training sessions. This is requiring more prep and structure now and I’m finding myself not quite keeping up with that.

What’s missing in MarTech?

A few weeks ago, Kickbox asked me, and a bunch of other folks who know their stuff, what was missing in MarTech. Yesterday they published what we thought. Check out their blog post and see what folks had to say.

Deliverability Discussion #3

Next deliverability discussion will be Wednesday April 22 at 5pm Ireland, Noon eastern, 9am pacific. As always, drop me a mail at laura-ddiscuss@ the obvious domain.

Moment of Zen

Things are very unsettled right now. Completely and totally unsettled. Even for those of us who are well geared up for and used to working from home are struggling in our current situation.

Myths about spamtraps

The nice folks at Kickbox asked me what I thought the biggest myths about spamtraps were. I said:

The internet is different in the EU

One of the interesting things about moving to the EU is experiencing the internet where GDPR is a thing. We get asked permission for everything. Including if we want shopping cart updates.

Tulsi v. Google: 1st amended complaint

Friday the Tusli Gabbard campaign filed the expected first amended complaint against Google for suspending her adwords account immediately after the first Democratic debate. A full copy of the complaint is available.

Doing our part

Spent the afternoon marching through the streets of Dublin with thousands of students demanding climate action now.

https://www.rte.ie/news/2019/0920/1077055-irish-students-to-demonstrate-for-climate-action/

Question of the day

Is 10,000 emails sent a few times a week a high enough volume to improve a Gmail reputation?

Whois silliness from Tucows

In the wake of GDPR, public whois records are 100% redacted. There is lots of work going on to attempt to provide the data without violating privacy laws, but no one is there yet.

Midterms in the US

It’s probably one of the most consequential midterm elections in the US ever.

Another day… another shooting

The importance of email fades when there is yet another school shooting in the US. I cannot fathom the depth of grief and sorry for the parents who lost their children today. It is an utter tragedy that we, as a country, continue to accept dead children as an acceptable price to pay for the second amendment.
I am a graduate of Virginia Tech. I went to class in the building that is no longer there because of that shooting. I shared a major with the first student the killer shot. I had a horrible realization a few years ago that shooting, once the worst mass shooting in US history, was no longer even in the top 3. I’m sure now it’s not in the top 5.
Yes, I could write another post about reaching the inbox. I could announce a new change at an ISP. But, in the face of what happened today, I can’t. Someone shot up a school. Another community is in mourning for their children. Our leaders in Congress offer thoughts and prayers and nothing else. This is the country the NRA has purchased.
“It’s too soon” to talk about gun control. “We shouldn’t react hastily” in response. We can’t travel on a plane with a full size bottle of shampoo and without taking our shoes off because of one man. But let’s not react hastily to another school with dead kids.
I do try and keep politics off this blog, I know how divisive politics is in the US these days.
But that I’m happy because a tragedy that I had a marginal association with is no longer even in the top 5 largest shootings is horrifying to me. How normalized has students, kids, babies getting shot become that I react so inappropriately? Way too normalized.
It’s Valentines day. A day we’re supposed to spend with our loved ones celebrating each other. Yet so many families are, instead, mourning their children or holding vigil in the hospital.
America should be better than this. I thought America was better than this. But I was so wrong. We can BE better that this, but we’re not living up to our ideals.
One of my favorite West Wing quotes (and, oh, there are many) starts:

About that DMARC "exploit"

A security researcher has identified a rendering flaw that allows for “perfect” phishing emails. From his website:

Happy Thanksgiving

Figuring out email

Social marketing

The following showed up in my mailbox a few moments ago
I commented to Steve that social marketing was about connecting with people, and businesses aren’t people. That’s why social marketing for B2B is hard: there are no people involved. Or, as he pointed out, B2B in the social space is bot to bot marketing.

Of course, there aren’t literal bots behind most brands. In the B2C space, brands have cultivated a social media presence that personifies the business in a way that appeals to their consumers. But that’s the brand projecting onto people and responding to people. When a business tries to connect to a business, it’s just two puppets talking.
Sure, there are small businesses where there isn’t the case. But generally businesses aren’t on social media to consume marketing. They’re on social media to generate marketing. They aren’t targets because you can’t market to a puppet.

Healthcare, eh?

I’m deeply disappointed in the vote out of the Senate today.
We’re a small business. We have paid for our own health insurance since 2002. We’re very lucky – neither of us has any major issues. Before ACA went into effect I worried about what would happen if one of us were to become sick. Would we fall afoul of our lifetime limits? Due to a rare cancer, my mother hit those back before I graduated college. Would our coverage be pulled because I didn’t mention the broken wrist from when I was 3? There were so many questions, and so many unknowns.
I watched the cost of our insurance go up and up. We bought a house in the Bay Area, and our health insurance was nearly 2/3 of our mortgage payment. Every year the price went up a little more, and the benefits went down.
Then ACA happened. I could stop worrying about lifetime limits and rescission. Our premiums dropped by hundreds of dollars a month. The costs of our monthly prescriptions plummeted to near zero.
Then Trumpcare and massive amounts of turmoil in the markets. Our group provider cancelled our policy and I’ve spent the last two months or so working with insurance agents to get ourselves covered. Our provider gave us 60 days notice. It wasn’t enough to ensure continual coverage. We were finally approved last week, with better coverage and lower premiums than we were paying pre-ACA.
I worry, though, about what happens to us if Trumpcare passes. Will premiums go back to where they were preACA? Will the small business market just evaporate? I don’t need a tax cut near as much as I need to know that the healthcare markets will be stable.
I want to focus on the things I’m good at. I know there’s a certain amount of administrative overhead related to being a small business owner and that these things are unavoidable. But still, there doesn’t seem to be any real benefit to blowing up health care in this underhanded fashion.
We are some of the folks who will get a tax break – not a huge one but we will be a beneficiary. I don’t think it will be enough to counter the jump in premiums – even if the premiums just go back to where they were pre-ACA.
I know policy is hard; I do it for a living. I know it’s not fun to watch the sausage being made – I grew up in DC. ACA has issues. But from my point of view the current healthcare debate is doing nothing to actually fix the issues. Instead, they’re making everything worse. Long term? We have options and money; we’ll probably be fine. But there are a lot of people who don’t have the options we do, and they’re going to be hurt.
This is bad policy, bad lawmaking and bad for small businesses like mine.

Happy Fourth

More on the botnet arrest in Spain

Yesterday I talked about Peter Yuryevich Levashov being arrested in Spain on a US warrant. That warrant and other accompanying docs are unsealed and available on the DOJ website. The arrest was also mentioned on the Rachel Maddow show last night (video).

There are quite a few people, including Rachel Maddow, speculating that this is somehow related to the Russian interference in the recent US elections. As many have pointed out, Levashov and his botnet were involved in spreading fake news during the 2012 elections in Russia.
I don’t know. There may be some connection, it does appear botnets were involved in some of the fake news events during the past election season. None of the docs presented by the Justice Department mention the election. We know that the DOJ investigates botnets, particularly those doing more than just spread spam. This isn’t the first time they’ve taken action against someone running a botnet. It could just be that they finally knew he was in a country that would act on a US warrant. It could be it was just time.
Or, this botnet could be part of the election investigation. I don’t think we really have enough information to go either way.

What an election!

Last night was a bit of a shocker and it’s been a total distraction for days. I’m having a hard time focusing on email and insight right now, as I’m sure lots of other people are.
All I can do today is share a picture of Grover… who is very happy after he stole my seat on the couch. And so comfortable I don’t have the heart to move him.

M3AAWG in Philly This Week

Today marks the training day for M³AAWG 37 in Philly. With all the traveling and speaking I’ve been doing lately we’re not going to be there. So no tweeting from me about the conference.

We’ve been attending various M³AAWG meetings since way early on – 2004? 2005? in San Diego. The organization has grown and matured and really come a long way since the early days. One of the challenges of M³AAWG is that it is a true working group. This isn’t like the various conferences I’ve been attending recently. I think there are two things that makes M³AAWG different from other conferences.
One of the most obvious things is the lack of a vendor floor. Sure, there are vendors and sponsors but vendors don’t bring in displays and have sales people stand around them to talk to folks. The conference does have demos and negotiations and meetings, but done differently than other events.
The other difference I’ve noticed is that M³AAWG is much more about participation. As the name says, this is a working group. Everyone is encouraged to get involved in things they’re interested in or that they think they can contribute to. Other conferences are a lot more about information being shared by speakers and panels. But during M³AAWG conferences, there are 2 mornings devoted to round tables.
The round tables are a true community effort, and probably deserve some discussion for people who’ve never been to the conference. Before the conference, members of the community submit ideas for things they think M³AAWG should discuss. These suggestions are reviewed by the board and leadership and ones that fall within M³AAWG’s purview are taken to the conference.
The first day of roundtables each topic is discussed in small groups. Volunteers facilitate a 20 – 30 minute discussion on the topic at hand with attendees. After time is called, attendees go to another topic and discuss that one. Part of what is discussed is not just the issue (say, how to get off a blacklist) but also what the final work product looks like. Is this a document for M³AAWG members? A panel at a future conference? A public document?
The second day is refinement of the roundtable topics and commitment from people to move the project forward. Champion is the person who is project managing this. Other roles depend on the work product. For presentation or panels, there is one set of roles. For documents there are roles as writers and editors and contributor.
M³AAWG has written and produced some useful resources and information over the years. Many of those resources are public, like best practice documents and metric reports. Other docs and reports are specifically for members.
The working group part of M3AAWG in one of its real strengths. Experts on all sides of the business of email get together to keep email useable and workable. Early on it there were a few barriers and some suspicion about various participant groups. But, as the industry as grown things have changed. Many folks have moved from ISPs to ESPs and back. There’s also a bigger place for companies that provide services to ESPs and ISPs, like us here at Word to the Wise. We’ve built bridges and technology and have been a positive force on the world.

Prepping for EEC

Tomorrow I head off to New Orleans to the EEC conference. It’s my first one and I’m really looking forward to meeting some of the people I only know online.
I’ll be speaking on two panels on Friday:
All You Ever Wanted to Know about Deliverability (But Were Afraid to Ask) at 10:50. This is your chance to ask those questions of myself and other experts in the field. I always enjoy Q&A panels and actually hearing from folks what their big deliverability questions are. (and remember, if you have a question, you can always send one to me for Ask Laura)
and the closing Keynote panel
ISP Postmasters & Blacklist Operators: Defending Consumer Inboxes at 1:10. I’m on a panel with various ISP postmasters, blacklist operators and we’ll be talking about what it’s like dealing with the deluge of mail. For instance, there is a huge outbreak of bot-spam at the moment, and a lot of the filters are struggling to keep up. In fact, I’m a last minute replacement for one filter company as they are in all-hands-on-deck firefighting mode to keep their customers safe.
Hope to see you there!

M3AAWG 36 – San Francisco

So many familiar faces. So many new faces.
This is my one M3AAWG this year and I’m so excited to be here. The organization has really grown and changed over the 10 years we’ve been a member. It’s only getting better and better.
I’ll be tweeting from public sessions (and probably tweeting random things that occur to me as I’m here) using the #m3aawg36 tag.

10 experts in 50 minutes: predictions for 2016

I’m thrilled to be one of the email experts speaking at the 2016 predictions webinar hosted by SparkPost.
Come join us!

We're hiring again and travel

We’re looking for a new employee. Full job details are available on our career page.
I’m excited with how the company is growing and developing. I’m looking forward to seeing the candidates and what they can bring to us.
For those of you going to the APSIS Email Marketing Evolved conference next week, I hope you will stop by and introduce yourself. I’ll be presenting at the pre-conference and the keynote the day of the conference.
That does mean blogging will likely be light next week. But I always come back from conferences energized and full of ideas and things to write about.

Thank You

Today will be my last day at Word to the Wise. I joined WttW in December of 2014, and it has been a wonderful journey. I have enjoyed working with Laura, Meri, and Steve, and I’ve enjoyed working with all of our clients helping solve their deliverability challenges.
Laura has such a deep understanding and knowledge of deliverability that every day I would find myself learning from her and trying to soak in as much as possible. Steve has extensive experience on the technical side of things, which helped when troubleshooting those pesky DNS issues. Meri is the glue that keeps everything together and is always willing to contribute.
WttW has some exciting things in the pipeline, and I have no doubt they will be very successful. I wish nothing but the best for WttW, and I will miss working with everyone. Thank you WttW for a wonderful learning experience.

Unexpected break

Sorry for the unexpected break in blogging. Been dealing with some emergencies. Happy 4th to my fellow citizens. Happy late Canada day to all our northern friends. We’ll resume blogging next week.

Sparkpost: Momentum in the Cloud

Today MessageSystems announced the launch of SparkPost: the world’s most advanced cloud email delivery service. Using the Momentum engine, SparkPost lets small and medium size companies have access to the tools previously reserved for larger companies.

February 2015 – The month in email

This was a short and busy month at WttW!

We attended another great M3AAWG conference, and had our usual share of interesting discussions, networking, and cocktails. I recapped our adventures here, and shared a photo of the people who keep your email safe while wearing kilts as well. We also commended Jayne Hitchcock on winning the Mary Litynski award for her work fighting abuse and cyberstalking.

Friday fun stuff

Between the rampaging llamas and a photo optical illusion the internet has been a silly, silly place the last 24 hours.
I have a little present for folks. I hinted there may be pictures from Kilt Day at M³AAWG in an earlier post.
There are, and all of the subjects have granted permission for me to share the photos here. Follow me below the cut.

Delays at Comcast

I’m seeing a significant amount of chatter on various lists that queues to Comcast are backing up right now. Looks to be something on their end.
Error messages are 421 “Try again later.” I’ll see if I can find someone at Comcast to give me some info.

URL reputation and shorteners

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 that hostname. So if other people send unwanted email that has the same URL in it that can cause your mail to be blocked or sent to the bulk folder.
That has a bunch of implications. If you run an affiliate programme where your affiliates use your URLs then spam sent by your affiliates can cause your (clean, opt-in, transactional) email to be treated as spam. If you send a newsletter with advertisers URLs in it then bad behaviour by other senders with the same advertisers can cause your email to be spam foldered. And, as we discussed yesterday, if spammers use the same URL shortener you do, that can cause your mail to be marked as spam.
Even if the hostname you use for your URLs is unique to you, if it resolves to the same IP address as a URL that’s being used in spam, that can cause delivery problems for you.
What does this mean when it comes to using URL shorteners (such as bit.ly, tinyurl.com, etc.) in email you send out? That depends on why you’re using those URL shorteners.
The URLs in the text/html parts of my message are big and ugly
Unless the URL you’re using is, itself, part of your brand identity then you really don’t need to make the URL in the HTML part of the message visible at all. Instead of using ‘<a href=”long_ugly_url”> long_ugly_url </a>’ or ‘<a href=”shortened_url”> shortened_url </a>’ use ‘<a href=”long_ugly_url”> friendly phrase </a>’.
(Whatever you do, don’t use ‘<a href=”long_ugly_url”> different_url </a>’, though – that leads to you falling foul of phishing filters).
The URLs in the text/plain parts of my message are big and ugly
The best solution is to fix your web application so that the URLs are smaller and prettier. That will make you seem less dated and clunky both when you send email, and when your users copy and paste links to your site via email or IM or twitter or whatever. “Cool” or “friendly” URLs are great for a lot of reasons, and this is just one. Tim Berners-Lee has some good thoughts on this, and AListApart has two good articles on how to implement them.
If you can’t do that, then using your own, branded URL shortener is the next best thing. Your domain is part of your brand – you don’t want to hide it.
I want to use a catchy URL shortener to enhance my brand
That’s quite a good reason. But if you’re doing that, you’re probably planning to use your own domain for your URL shortener (Google uses goo.gl, Word to the Wise use wttw.me, etc). That will avoid many of the problems with using a generic URL shortener, whether you implement it yourself or use a third party service to run it.
I want to hide the destination URL from recipients and spam filters
Then you’re probably spamming. Stop doing that.
I want to be able to track clicks on the link, using bit.ly’s neat click track reporting
Bit.ly does have pretty slick reporting. But it’s very weak compared to even the most basic clickthrough reporting an ESP offers. An ESP can tell you not just how many clicks you got on a link, but also which recipients clicked and how many clicks there were for all the links in a particular email or email campaign, and how that correlates with “opens” (however you define that).
So bit.ly’s tracking is great if you’re doing ad-hoc posts to twitter, but if you’re sending bulk email you (or your ESP) can do so much better.
I want people to have a short URL to share on twitter
Almost all twitter clients will abbreviate a URL using some URL shortener automatically if it’s long. Unless you’re planning on using your own branded URL shortener, using someone else’s will just hide your brand. It’s all probably going to get rewritten as t.co/UgLy in the tweet itself anyway.
If your ESP offers their own URL shortener, integrating into their reporting system for URLs in email or on twitter that’s great – they’ll be policing users of that just the same as users of their email service, so you’re unlikely to be sharing it with bad spammers for long enough to matter.
All the cool kids are using bit.ly, so I need to to look cool
This one I can’t help with. You’ll need to decide whether bit.ly links really look cool to your recipient demographic (Spoiler: probably not) and, if so, whether it’s worth the delivery problems they risk causing.
And, remember, your domain is part of your brand. If you’re hiding your domain, you’re hiding your branding.
So… I really do need a URL shortener. Now what?
It’s cheap and easy to register a domain for just your own use as a URL shortener. Simply by having your own domain, you avoid most of the problems. You can run a URL shortener yourself – there are a bunch of freely available packages to do it, or it’s only a few hours work for a developer to create from scratch.
Or you can use a third-party provider to run it for you. (Using a third-party provider does mean that you’re sharing the same IP address as other URL shorteners – but everyone you’re sharing with are probably people like you, running a private URL shortener, so the risk is much, much smaller than using a freely available public URL shortener service.)
These are fairly simple fixes for a problem that’s here today, and is going to get worse in the future.

Talking about deliverability

Next Tuesday, September 23, I’ll be speaking about deliverability at a webinar sponsored by Message Systems and presented by the American Marketing Association.
Registration is open to all, so if you’re interested in hearing some of my opinions about deliverability past, present and future, sign up.

Happy Labor Day

Monday is Labor Day in the US and most of us have off. My neighborhood is already resplendent in scents of grills. Enjoy the day off and we’ll be back talking about spam next week.

You paid money for that?

I just got a call from someone claiming that I “filled out an online form” asking for more information about “an online education.” When pressed, the nice woman kept changing her story about who she was calling for or how she got my phone number. Eventually she admitted that they have a collection of 50 or more websites and it’s very possible that I didn’t give them my information directly.
She did want to reassure me that I had “no obligation to respond.”
How very thoughtful of her to reassure me that some random person giving her my corporate phone number does not obligate me to anything.
I don’t believe for a second that anyone who knows me signed me up to receive information. But I do appear to have gotten on some new mailing list recently. I’m getting a lot of ‘internship’ and ‘summer work’ offers in snail mail. These advertisements that are clearly targeting a different demographic than the one I belong to.
At least 4 companies (so far) seem to have paid good money for totally fake information about me. Of course, when they’re calling or sending me mail there’s no way I can stop it or fix it. I can’t even tell them their vendor is giving them bad information. I guess I just have to take comfort in the fact that they are wasting their money. I only wish they weren’t wasting my time as well.
This is just one example of why purchasing information, or trusting information filled into websites, is a bad idea. The company selling my information makes their profit and it doesn’t matter that their information is bad. If it really was someone filling in my information, that person is wasting the company’s time.
I’ve worked with marketers long enough to know that they just consider the bad data a cost of doing business. Data integrity just isn’t relevant to making a profit. Send enough email, send enough postcards, ring enough phones and profit appears. Even if their targets aren’t what they were sold.

Using Google to taunt coworkers

Happy Friday, all. This has been a rough week for so many people, I thought we needed a little humor.
From Tim Norton (@norton_tim) on Twitter.

Feel good Friday

I’ve told myself I can’t stop working until I post. Sadly, I can’t think anything useful to post. It’s been one of those weeks where I had some tricky and complicated client issues to work through. I can think of a lot of things to say, but I don’t want co compromise any client information. I wouldn’t do it on purpose, but I am very careful not to unintentionally leak.
Thus, the best I can do is point out that the city of Gotham was saved by Batkid today.

Oops? Path Texts Man's Entire Phonebook @ 6AM

(Hi! Al Iverson here. I’ll be guest blogging a bit while Laura and Steve are off dealing with stuff.)
Over on the BRANDED3 blog, Search Strategist Stephen Kenwright shares how social network Path sent text messages to everybody in his address book, very early in the morning on Tuesday, telling everyone that he had shared pictures with him on Path. Except, according to him, he hadn’t.
This even resulted in a number of odd, robotic voice phone calls to Stephen’s friends and family. Why? Because nowadays, when you send a text message to a landline, most phone companies convert it into a voice call. The phone rings, you answer it, and a robotic voice reads the text message to you. The functionality is a bit creepy, and I can imagine that it would scare the heck out of somebody’s grandparents.
Path is saying that basically the whole thing is user error, but I’m not sure that I’m convinced of that. Even if Kenneth somehow missed this option at install time, Path likely needs to make this feature much more clearly opt-in and ensure that users know what they’re getting into. Right or wrong, if it keeps happening, it’s going to lead to more negative press and perhaps even new scrutiny from the FTC. You don’t mess around with SMS permission.

What a week!

It has been quite an insane and busy week here. So I share with you what’s kept me going much of the week.

Quick blog housekeeping

I’ve been getting a lot of comments on posts 2 and 3 years old. Most of them aren’t very valuable comments, so I decided to shut down commenting on any threads older than 2 months.

I am, after all, a geek

Not email, but science is so cool.

Email without filters

… or Find the False Positive.
Anyone sending a lot of email has complained about spam filters and false positives at some point. But most people haven’t run a mailbox with no spam filters in front of it in recent years, so don’t have much of a feel for what an unfiltered mailbox looks like, how important filters are and how difficult their job is.
I run no transaction level filters in front of my mailbox, just content filters that route mail to one of several inboxes or a junk folder, so if I want to I can look at what unfiltered email looks like. I took data from all mail that was sent to me yesterday, and put it in a format that really shows the problem filters face and especially the difficulty of spotting which mail in the junk folder is a false positive.
An inbox with no filters looks like this.

Running a spam filter against it, simply categorizing each email as spam (pink) or not-spam (green) looks like this.

Even with the messages categorized as spam vs not-spam it’s hard to work out which messages are important and which aren’t, let alone where the false positives might be.
If I sort the categories by hand you get this – where you can see that out of 1200 or so mails about three quarters were spam. Of the three false positives two were bulk email that I didn’t care that I didn’t receive and only one was email that I considered important.

Happy Thanksgiving

I’m still catching up from being out last week, so no blog post today. I do, however, have tart to share. Mostly. Sorta. We ate it all.

Vacation

After 9 years of running Word to the Wise, we’re taking a vacation. A really-o, truly-o vacation that doesn’t involve stealing a couple days before a conference or business meeting or visiting family. Also no internet and no email. I’m not even taking my laptop (I am taking my iPad, but it’s an awesome game machine).
I’ll be back to posting when I get back into the office mid-May.
Aloha!

New Blog Design

After a little more than two years and 500 posts we thought it was time for a redesign of the Word to the Wise blog.
While we were cleaning up the design we also fixed some functionality that was broken and added some new features:

Problems with Barracuda blocklist

Mickey documents a problem he encountered with the Barracuda blocklist and relisting happening after a delisting even when there was no mail being sent through the IP in question. I’ve not had much interaction with Barracuda or their blocklist so I don’t have many suggestions. If you have useful information, head over there and comment.

Traveling again!

I’m headed off early tomorrow morning to help celebrate a friend’s wedding (Hi Al!). I’ll be back at work on Tuesday and blogging will be back on schedule.

Friday Funny

Finding relevancy

I frequently talk about sending relevant emails. Today Ken Magill reviewed the new book Successful E-mail Marketing Strategies, from Hunting to Farming by Arthur Middleton Hughes and Arthur Sweetser. In Ken’s words:

Light blogging through 2009

There will be some light blogging here through the end of the year. We are headed out for our first vacation in years next week, then will be spending some time with family. I will be blogging before we leave and will try to get some posts written to trickle out while I’m gone.
I hope everyone has a happy and relaxed holiday season. I am looking forward to resting, recharging and returning ready to take on 2009.

TWSD!

One important aspect of getting good delivery is to look like legitimate email. A big part of that is to not do what spammers do. More specifically, do not do the things that ISPs trigger on when identifying spammers.
There are a lot of these “tricks” and “delivery techniques” used by spammers. They may seem like tiny things, but these are things that any legitimate mailer will want to avoid doing in order to get the best delivery you can.
When I notice an otherwise legitimate mailer doing something “that spammers do” or a spammer doing something that makes me think “don’t do that” I’ll talk about it here.
Keep an eye open for posts tagged “TWSD” (that’s what spammers do!).

Go vote!

If you are a US citizen, do not forget to go vote today. This is it, the culmination of way too many months of politicking and campaigning. Be part of the finish.

Light blogging next 2 weeks.

There will probably be light blogging here the next 2 weeks. Tomorrow I am off to a friend’s wedding down south and next Sunday I am off to the MAAWG meeting in Ft. Lauderdale for 4 days.

New Blog Theme

As you can see we have updated the blog theme. This is a custom theme based on the WordPress K2 theme. The overall look is much lighter and fits in better with our main website.
As part of the change I have also re-categorized all the previous posts into 4 categories:

Hard drive failure

I’m feeing a bit disconnected today. See, my hard drive failed last night and my laptop would not boot. Thanks to the local Apple store Genius bar and Apple Care my current laptop is in getting repaired. Unfortunately, that means I am stuck on my old machine without any of my RSS feeds or bookmarks and a mail client that has taken all day to sync with my IMAP server.
Tomorrow will be better.

Report subscriber and changes to whitelisting at some ISPs

If you’re reading this through the archives please check the date before commenting on this post.

Mark Brownlow has a post on a new technology for senders. I think this will help ensure senders have a say in the general delivery of mail for receivers.
Through the grapevine, I have also heard there’s a new technology developed by a company called Purple Cod. This technology makes it easy for end users to control ISP whitelists. Users at ISPs that deploy this technology will be able to whitelist any sender at the MTA level. When a user receives a mail, there will be a new button “whitelist this sender”. That will exempt that sender from spam filtering of any future email.
The ISPs looking at this technology believe this will improve overall delivery for senders.
In order to fully take advantage of this technology, ISPs will be moving to only allowing email from whitelisted senders to send mail to the ISPs. Senders who are not whitelisted will use a different pool of servers. These servers will only accept 1 in 1000 emails. If a sender gets mail through, and the recipient requests whitelisting then the sender will be moved to the whitelist only pool.
More rumors as I hear them.