CategoryIndustry

Transactional mail can be spam

Marketers have a thing about transactional mail. In the US, transactional mail is exempt from many of the CAN SPAM regulations. If they label a mail transactional, then they can send it even when the recipient has opted-out! The smart marketer looks for opportunities to send transactional mail so they can bother spam get their brand in front of people who’ve opted out. Enter the...

Resources for safer conferences

The MAAWG conference was held in Brooklyn a few weeks ago. Many positive discussions and sessions happened at the conference. But there was an incident of harassment during the conference where one participant assaulted multiple other attendees during late evening activities. I’m not going to speak too much to what happened as I wasn’t there. What I will say is that I am proud of my...

Spamhaus DBL

Over the last few months I’ve gotten an increasing number of questions about the Spamhaus DBL. So it’s probably time to do a blog post about it. Last year I wrote about the DBL: DBL is the Domain Block List. It lists domains and not IP addresses. I’ll be honest, I don’t have as much experience with the DBL as with other lists, but I have had a few clients on the DBL. DBL is tied into...

Twilio acquires Sendgrid

Woke up this morning to the news that Sendgrid has been acquired by Twilio in an all stock deal. This fills a gap in Twilio’s platform, they didn’t seem to have any email capability before. I’m wondering how this will shake out in the broader email industry. Sendgrid is one of the biggest providers of SMTP services and have a significant customer base. I’ve worked with a...

Good morning DMARC

I’m thinking I may need to deploy DMARC report automation sooner rather than later.

… and so on, and on, and on for a lot further down the mailbox.

2018 JD Falk Award … a mailing list

It’s M3AAWG time. Even though we’re not there, I’m getting regular updates from friends and colleagues who are there. Yesterday, was the presentation of the 2018 JD Falk award. The award recognises “a particularly meritorious project undertaken by a dedicated individual or group reflecting the spirit of volunteerism and community building.” In this case, the award...

Fun with spam filters

I recently had a challenging travel experience in the Netherlands, trying to get from Schipol airport to a conference I was speaking at. As part of my attempt to get out of the airport, I installed UBER on my phone. There were some challenges with getting UBER to authorise my phone number, so I tried linking it to my Gmail account. I checked Gmail today and noticed there was a message from UBER...

All filters are not equal

Many questions about delivery problems often assume that there is one standard email filter and the rules are the same across all of them. Unfortunately, this isn’t really the case. The biggest divide is consumer versus business filters. Business filters don’t really care about things like engagement. A sender could have near perfect engagement with a message to a business. But a...

Zoho, phishing and who’s next?

ZDnet reports that Zoho’s problems with phishing aren’t over. Their report states that Zoho is being used as a pipeline to exfiltrate data from phished accounts. The software platform’s email address service, on both zoho.com and zoho.eu domains, is being exploited in 40 percent of phishing campaigns in which email “is the primary exfiltration vehicle.” That’s...

Schroedinger’s email

The riskiest email to send is that very first email. It’s a blank slate. Even if you’re sending confirmation messages, you don’t really know anything about how this email is going to affect your reputation. It’s Schroedinger’s email. The address is both good and bad, until you send to it. If it’s good, great things will happen. You’ll be happy. The...

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