Recently, an abuse desk rep asked what to do when customers were complaining about being assigned an IP address located on a blocklist. Because not every blocklist actually affects mail delivery it’s helpful to identify if the listing is causing a problem before diving in and trying to resolve the issue. Find out whether mail is actually being blocked, or whether the customer just went to...
Sept 17, 2019: Shutting down comments on this post because we cannot help you recover any email account and I am concerned about the number of people who are providing PII (including phone numbers, credit card numbers!!! and email addresses) in the comments. A tagged email address is any email address that provides some additional information to the recipient when they receive email sent to that...
I called out David Williams from appendleads.com yesterday for his spam. Sure he’s a spammer, his database is full of garbage information and his email violates CAN SPAM but he’s not that unusual in the realm of list sellers. He is very typical of the people I see offering lists for sale. List sellers are the internet version of used car salesmen. Everyone knows they are slimy sales...
I’ve seen some mentions recently of ESPs suggesting that if you use your own domain in the From: of mail you send through an ESP then that ESP can’t “do email authentication” properly unless they require you to edit your domains DNS settings. That’s not really so, but there is a kernel of truth in there. The real situation is, unsurprisingly, a bit more complicated...
I did an interview with Direct Mag recently about what I recommend mailers do to monitor email deliverability.
You feel the need to add PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS NOT A SPAM OR AUTOMATED EMAIL, IT’S ONLY A REQUEST FOR A LINK EXCHANGE. YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS HAS NOT BEEN ADDED TO ANY LISTS, AND YOU WILL NOT BE CONTACTED AGAIN.IF YOU’D LIKE TO MAKE SURE WE DON’T CONTACT YOU AGAIN, PLEASE FILL IN THE FOLLOWING FORM: <link> PLEASE ACCEPT OUR APOLOGIES FOR CONTACTING YOU. To any of the...
The last of seven in our occasional series on why ESPs need, or don’t need, lots of IP addresses to send mail properly. I need multiple IP addresses in different locations so as to provide redundancy against blacklisting of my ISP Why this is right If you think that your email is likely to be blocked due to the reputation of your ISP then having a backup ISP makes some operational sense. Why this...
I’ve been recently dealing with a client who is looking at implementing authentication on their domains. He’s done a lot of background research into the schemes and has a relatively firm grasp on the issue. At this point we’re working out what policies he wants to set and how to correctly implement those policies. His questions were well informed for the most part. A few of them...
Sometimes you might want to make it clear that a domain isn’t valid for email. Perhaps it’s a domain or subdomain that’s just used for infrastructure, perhaps it’s a brand-specific domain you’re only using for a website. Or perhaps you’re a target for phishing and you’ve acquired some lookalike domains, either pre-emptively or after enforcement action...
Over the weekend, one of the major ISPs purged a lot of abandoned accounts from their system. This has resulted in a massive increase in 550 user unknown bounces at that ISP. This ISP is one of those that uses bounces to feed into their reputation system and the purge may cause otherwise good senders to be blocked temporarily. Talking to clients and other industry folks, it looks like the...
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