One of the top entries on the list of things deliverability folks hear all the time is, “But my mail is all CAN SPAM compliant!” The thing is… no one handling inbound mail really cares. Seriously. CAN SPAM is a law that is little more than don’t lie, don’t hide, and heed the no. Even more importantly, the law itself states that there is no obligation for ISPs to...
When faced with unexplained deliverability changes one of the first questions many folks ask is “Did the algorithm change.” In many ways this is an meaningless question. Why? Because there are two obvious answers to the question. A1: Of course it didn’t. A2: Of course it did. Both answers are correct, but they’re answering different underlying questions. When we understand...
AOL posted on their blog today about changes to DMARC reporting and FBL messages as they continue to transition domains to the OATH infrastructure. As AOL domains go to the new infrastructure, DMARC reports for those domains will be included in the existing Yahoo DMARC reports. After the MX migration is done, they’ll start migrating the actual user mailboxes. Right now, FBL messages for AOL...
There are lots of places to get deliverability help, I thought I’d list some of them here so I have a post to point people to. Of course, we provide deliverability consulting services and have done since 2001. Our customers are mostly large companies sending millions of emails a month. I focus mostly on complex problems that other deliverability folks haven’t solved. Overall I focus...
Benjamin asked in the comments where in the interface the “unsubscribe” or “block” popup appeared. This is the dialog box Microsoft uses when the add the “unsubscribe here” link at the top of a message. Screenshots taken today from my Hotmail account: At this point we have 3 of the major webmail providers (Yahoo, Microsoft, Gmail) using List-Unsubscribe headers...
For folks who aren’t following the discussion about whois records and GDPR compliance there’s a decent summary at vice.com: What Is Going to Happen With Whois? The problem, briefly stated, is that ICANN has agreements with the thousands of domain registrars around the globe like GoDaddy or HostGator which oblige the companies to post WHOIS data—such as names, emails, and phone...
Last week some folks were mentioning a spike in unsubscribes from Yahoo. This is being investigated.
An interesting observation from Brian Curry about how Microsoft is using the List Unsubscribe header in their interface. The short version is that Microsoft is only supporting mailto: links. They’re ignoring any List-Unsubscribe links that are a URL. Here are some screenshots. When the sender is using a List-Unsubscribe <; header, Microsoft states that there is no information on how to...
The AOL postmaster team posted some information about the upcoming MX transition on their blog. [S]tarting this week, the majority of AOL’s MX records will point to [OATH’s] new combined servers. This should be transparent to any sender as those servers will operate in simple pass-through mode. This means senders with established FBLs will continue to receive them from our AOL mail...
We took a quick trip to Dublin last week. I had every intention of blogging while on the trip, but… oops. I did get to meet with some clients, and had a great dinner while discussing email and delivery. Coming back, I see a lot of folks still reporting delivery problems to Microsoft properties. I’ve been operating under the assumption this was temporary as kinks were worked out after...
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