Via mailing lists and Al Iverson’s Spamresource blog, Yahoo China domains (yahoo.com.cn and yahoo.cn) are no longer accepting email. Yahoo announced in April of 2013 they are shutting down their email services in August of the same year and advises users to create new accounts with Alibana. While the domains still have valid MX records, they are no longer accepting mail. There is no...
Listcast acquired by MailerMailer
Listcast, an email list management service, has been acquired. MailerMailer will take over management and support of all Listcast customers effective immediately from Domainate, Inc.
Language as filtering criteria
A few months ago I was working on a delivery audit for a client who sends mail in multiple languages. We discovered that the language of an email has a significant delivery impact. The same email in different languages was delivered differently, particularly at Gmail. Emails in a language I don’t normally receive email in were delivered to my bulk folder. Other folks have commented on...
AHBL Wildcards the Internet
AHBL (Abusive Host Blocking List) is a DNSBL (Domain Name Service Blacklist) that has been available since 2003 and is used by administrators to crowd-source spam sources, open proxies, and open relays. By collecting the data into a single list, an email system can check this blacklist to determine if a message should be accepted or rejected. AHBL is managed by The Summit Open Source Development...
Email is inherently a malicious traffic stream
It’s something many people don’t think about, but the majority of the traffic coming into the SMTP port is malicious. Spam is passively malicious, in that it just uses resources and bothers people. But there is a lot of actively malicious traffic coming into the SMTP port. Email is used as a vector to spread viruses and other malware. Email is also used for phishing and scamming. Many...
ESPs and consolidation
Earlier this week Bloomberg news reported that an anonymous source told them Verizon was looking to acquire or investigate a partnership with AOL. It didn’t take long for the Verizon CEO to quash the acquisition rumors. Acquisitions and partnerships have always been around in technology, this is nothing new. But it made me think a little bit about the acquisitions and mergers in the ESP...
Email predictions for 2015
Welcome to a whole new year. It seems the changing of the year brings out people predicting what they think will happen in the coming year. It’s something I’ve indulged in a couple times over my years of blogging, but email is a generally stable technology and it’s kind of boring to predict a new interface or a minor tweak to filters. Of course, many bloggers will go way out on...
December 2014: The month in email
2014 has been a busy and exciting year at Word to the Wise (look for more on that in a year-end wrap-up post next week!) and this month was particularly thrilling for us as we officially doubled our size with the addition of Josh and Meri on our client services team. If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you’ve probably spotted Josh’s byline on a few posts: Google’s Inbox Team answers questions...
Top Commented Blog Posts on WttW in 2014
Here are the top 6 most commented on blog topics our Industry News & Analysis blog. In April, Laura wrote about the ins and outs about Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance also known as DMARC. If you are not familiar with DMARC or want to know the differences between strict and relaxed alignment, read the blog post here. Earlier this year WttW’s website was...
Merry Christmas
A retro merry christmas from everyone at Word to the Wise!