The default SpamAssassin configuration considers any date far in the future to be extremely suspicious, which is pretty reasonable. However, as @schampeo points out, it also seems to consider any date later than 2009 to be “far in the future”. That means that until the SpamAssassin folks roll out a fix, and that gets deployed by SpamAssassin users pretty much all email will get an...
One of the more common complaints from senders is that ISPs won’t tell them what to do. Al Iverson takes this on in his post “Did you catch that?” He says: […] email service providers and marketers repeatedly [ask] for ISPs to tell them what the rules are. […] ISPs have been telling you what the rules are for years now. Stop feigning deafness. Changes are coming, and...
How much control over delivery do senders have? I have repeatedly said that senders control their delivery. This is mostly true. Senders control their side of the delivery chain, but there is a point where the recipient takes over and controls things. As a recipient I can report your email as spam forward your email to another account on another mail system file your email in a mailbox I never...
In part 1 I talked about internationalised domain names, and how they were mapped onto ASCII strings. For sending email there are four bits of the message where internationalisation might need to be considered. Sender or recipient email address Header content, such as the Subject line or the “friendly” name in the To or From The visible body of the message The web URLs the body of the...
There’s been a gentle bit of uproar recently about ICANN finally beginning the process of rolling out support for internationalized domain names (IDN) at the DNS root and the effect that may have on email senders. Even if you haven’t noticed the uproar, it’s still a subject you probably want to be familiar with if you’re sending email. What are internationalised domain...
Al has a good post listing the top 5 things senders should remember when dealing with blacklists. One of the critical things to remember about blocklists is that they are an early warning sign. Sure, some of them are one crank and his cat and will not hurt your overall delivery. A sender may be listed for totally spurious reasons . On the other hand, many of the widely used public lists and the...
Recently, one of my clients had a new employee make a mistake and ended up sending newsletters to people in their database that had not subscribed to those particular newsletters. This resulted in their recipients getting 3 extra emails from them. These things happen, people fat-finger database queries or aren’t as careful with segmentation as they should be. My clients were predictably...
Recently Ken Magill wrote an article looking at how an ESP was attempting to sell him services based on the ESPs ‘high deliverability rates.’ I commented that Ken was right, and I still think he is. Ken has a followup article today. In the first part he thanks Matt Blumberg from Return Path for posting a thoughtful blog post on the piece. Matt did have a very thoughtful article...
Seth Godin has a post up today talking about how friction, that is the cost of sending marketing, is good for marketing. With more friction, marketers make choices about sending instead of sending to everyone. The post touches on a point I’ve certainly tried to explain to clients and senders in general. Email, of course, is free. Except it’s not. The friction that slows down sending...
Mickey at Spamtacular has information about Verizon’s email system that will have relevance for anyone working in delivery. Verizon has partnered with several megaportal sites depending on which Verizon service a subscriber is using. FiOS customers can pick between AOL and Yahoo while DSL customers get AOL, Yahoo, MSN Premium, or Windows Live to select among. The portal site that you select...
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