Recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Jillian Bowen and talking about deliverability for her podcast.
March 11, 2020
Deliverability mythbusting
11March
March 9, 2020
Back at it
09March
Back at the office after traveling to visit a bunch of our US friends recently. A lot of news, both in and out of the email space, happened while we were gone. The biggest stories are outside the email space and I will admit to following the coronavirus news probably closer than I should. (My graduate work was done across the hall from one of the major avian epidemic monitoring labs. This is the...
February 17, 2020
Address verification doesn’t fix any real problem
17February
Would you trust an address verification company that used twitter spam to advertise their product? Would you trust an address verification company that sent email spam to advertise their product? Would you trust an address verification company that sent email advertising their product to made up addresses? Would you trust an address verification company that sent email advertising their product...
February 11, 2020
The OSI Seven Layer Model
11February
In the 1970s, while the early drafts of the Internet were being developed, a competing model for networking was being put together by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization). The OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) Model broke the work needed to implement a distributed network service into seven separate layers of abstraction, from the physical infrastructure at layer one all the...
February 10, 2020
Some Microsoft thoughts
10February
Right at the end of January, Microsoft appears to have made couple of changes to how they’re handling authentication. The interesting piece of this is that, in both cases, Microsoft is taking authentication protocols and using them in ways that are slightly outside the spec, but are logical extensions of the spec. The first is an extension of DMARC. They’re rolling out inbox flags for...
February 4, 2020
Your first M3AAWG meeting
04February
It’s that time of year again where nearly all my client calls involve the question, “are you going to be at M3AAWG SF?” Up until last year, the answer was always yes. But now it’s not a brief drive up the peninsula and a BART ride into the city, it’s a transatlantic plane flight. The clients I was talking with today said this was their first MAAWG and what did I...
January 27, 2020
Troubleshooting: part 3
27January
As I continue to think about how people troubleshoot email delivery I keep finding other things to talk about. Today we’re going to talk about the question most folks start with when troubleshooting delivery. “Did ISP change something?” At least once a week I check some delivery or email fora and some form of the question is sitting there. “Did X change something? We...
January 23, 2020
What about the email client?
23January
There are a lot of folks in the email industry that take issue with my stance that DMARC is not a viable solution to phishing. DMARC, at it’s absolute best, addresses one tiny, TINY piece of phishing. Look at this message I received today. My mail client presents this as from Quickbooks and hides the actual from email address from me. Most mail clients do that by default. It is possible to...
January 20, 2020
Same MX, different filters
20January
One of the things I do for clients is look at who is really handling mail for their subscribers. Steve’s written a nifty tool that does a MX lookup for a list of domains. Then I have a SQL script that takes the raw MX lookup and categorizes not by the domain or even the MX, but by the underlying mail filter. Part of that script classifies domains hosted by Google apps as a separate filter...
January 14, 2020
Bad marketing automation, part deux
14January
Back in April I wrote about some poor marketing automation that ended up spamming me with ‘cart abandonment’ emails when the issue was the company’s credit card processing went down. That post has now been scraped by the spammers Moosend and they keep sending me… poorly targeted automated spam. So, yes, Moosend (who are prolific and annoying spammers) are sending me spam...
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