CategoryIndustry

November 9, 2019

ESP being phished is a Black Friday cataclysm

By laura

3 Min read

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09November

There is currently a phishing attack against a major ESP. The mail came through what I presume was a compromised account hosted at one of the providers. It’s just as possible this was a domain set up for the sole purpose of phishing, though. The underlying attack is pretty good. They took the ESP compliance notification email and changed a couple of the links to point to their phishing page...

November 6, 2019

CAN SPAM says I can!

By laura

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06November

Saw a new disclaimer on mail sent to an address harvested off our website today: disclaimer: This is an advertisement and a promotional mail-in adherence to the guidelines of CAN-SPAM act 2003. We have clearly mentioned the source id of this mail, also clearly mentioned the subject line, and they are in no way misleading in any form. We have found your email address through our own efforts on the...

October 29, 2019

Mentally modelling filters

By laura

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29October

When we talk about filters, we often think there is one filter. But, in many cases there are multiple stages of filters, each examining mail in a different way. In deliverability terms the easiest filters to ignore are the individual user filters. Mostly because there’s nothing we can do about those. These are the baysean style filters built into a lot of email clients as well as specific...

October 23, 2019

Microsoft and SmartScreen

By laura

3 Min read

1 comment

23October

There was another thread on mailop today about email filtering. This one was about Microsoft and SmartScreen. After watching a bunch of folks make lots of comments about what SmartScreen was, and get it wrong, I waded in. One thing that I always thought was common knowledge, but apparently isn’t, is that SmartScreen is primarily a content filter. Microsoft does use IP and domain reputation...

October 14, 2019

Details matter

By laura

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14October

I field a lot of delivery questions on various online fora. Often people try and anonymise what they’re asking about by abstracting out the question. The problem is that there are very few answers we can give in the abstract. What are some examples of these types of questions? Should you always remove an address that hard bounces? Well, in general, yes. But there are a small number of cases...

October 10, 2019

Microsoft and SPF

By laura

1 Min read

5 comments

10October

Many deliverability folks stopped recommending publishing SPF records for the 5322.from address to get delivery to Microsoft. I even remember Microsoft saying they were stopping doing SenderID style checking. A discussion on the emailgeeks slack channel has me rethinking that. It started out with one participant asking if other folks were seeing delivery improvement at MS if they added a SPF...

October 9, 2019

Why is DMARC failing?

By laura

2 Min read

6 comments

09October

Multiple times over the last few weeks folks have posted a screenshot of Google Postmaster tools showing some percentage of mail failing DMARC. They then ask why DMARC is failing. Thanks to how DMARC was designed, they don’t need to ask anyone this, they have all the data they need to work this out themselves. The DMARC protocol contains a way to request reports when DMARC authentication...

October 7, 2019

New Deliverability Resource

By laura

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07October

The nice folks over at Postmark shared a new deliverability resource last week. The SMTP Field Manual. This is a collection of SMTP responses they’ve seen in the wild. This is a useful resource. They’re also collecting responses from other senders, meaning we can crowdsource a useful resource for email deliverability folks.

October 4, 2019

False 550 responses from Verizon

By laura

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04October

This week there was a reported uptick in user unknown responses for verizon email addresses. The specific response folks were seeing was: 554 delivery error: dd xx@verizon.net is no longer valid. [-20] -mta4047.aol.mail.bf1.yahoo.com This appears to be a problem with their require-recipient-valid-since header checking. They are aware and are working on a fix. What this means for senders is if...

October 2, 2019

Conferences and Pac Man

By laura

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02October

On the emailgeeks slack channel someone asked for advice about going to conferences. There were lots of great suggestions. I threw in the Pac Man Rule and realised a lot of folks haven’t heard of it before. Eric Holscher created the Pac Man rule. The rule is really simple. If you’re standing in a group talking at a conference a circle can make it challenging for new people to join you...