I’m doing testing on a new release of Abacus at the moment, so I’m in a software QA (Quality Assurance) frame of mind. One of the tenets of software QA is “Assume users are malicious”. That’s also one of the tenets of security engineering, but in a completely different way. A security engineer treats users as malicious, as the users he or she is most concerned about...
James from Cloudmark has his own insight on spamtraps.
A few months ago, I got spammed by a major brand. I know their ESP takes abuse seriously, so I sent a note into their abuse desk. It bounced with a 550 user unknown. I sent another note into a different abuse address, it bounced. I sent mail into their corporate HQ, it disappeared into a black hole. I eventually connected with their delivery person and he’d not seen hide nor hair of any...
I was hoping to have a detailed post up today about the conditions where gmail presents the user with a “via” but time seems to have gotten away from me. But I can give you the conclusions. A via is presented to the user when you have a DKIM pass and the domain in the d= does not match the domain in the visible from address. In this case the interface shows via the d= domain. A via is...
There are a several approaches to authenticating email, and the different authentication methods have a lot of different settings to choose from (sometimes because they’re useful, other times just because they were designed by committee). It’s nice that they have that flexibility for the complex situations that might benefit from them, but almost all the time you just want to choose a...
Last week Charter had a technical problem that caused them to respond with “user unknown” to email sent to valid users.
I recommend re-activating any address to Charter that was disabled July 14 or 15.
I’m getting slammed by spam advertising URLs at from
Ethix Marketing LLC
711 S. Carson Street Suite 4
Carson City, Nevada 89701
The kicker? They’re violating CAN SPAM while they’re doing it. Seriously, sending mail out through open relays and proxies with forged From: addresses is a violation of CAN SPAM. And they’re spamming for ambulance chasers.
Spammers, eh?
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...
I so often talk about the failures of various email marketing programs that it’s only fair I mention when someone gets it right. We spent the past week with family on the east coast. Our flight back to the west coast was very, very early Sunday morning so I booked a night at the airport hotel. That way we could just stumble to the shuttle at some horrible hour and not worry about trying to...
What is the perfect frequency to send mail? Is it daily, weekly, monthly, hourly, minutely (is that even a word?) or randomly? Any number of experts will give you a definitive answer to this question, but I don’t believe there is a single answer. The frequency recipients will respond to depends on the type of mail, the recipient expectations, the sender and a host of other factors. For one...
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