“All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.” Mutt is a commandline mail client that’s been in use and been actively developed for about two decades. It’s considered by many to be the most powerful mail client available, particularly for handling large volumes of email. It’s weaknesses include poor rich text handling and desktop integration for attachment...
An old blog post from 2013, that’s still relevant today. “Blocked for Bot-like Behavior” An ESP asked about this error message from Hotmail and what to do about it. “Bot-like” behaviour usually means the sending server is doing something that bots also do. It’s not always that they’re spamming, often it’s a technical issue. But the technical problems make the sending server look like a bot...
When you click on a link in your mail, where does it go? Are you sure? HTTP Redirects In most bulk mail sent the links in the mail aren’t the same as the page the recipients browser ends up at when they click on it. Instead, the link in the mail goes to a “click tracker” run by the ESP that records that that recipient clicked on this link in this email, then redirects the...
Using SSL TLS to protect data in transit and authenticate servers you contacted originally required specialized software, complex configuration and expensive and complicated to require certificates. The need for specialized software is long since gone. Pretty much every web server and mail server will support SSL out of the box. Basic server configuration is now pretty simple – give the...
Someone mentioned on a mailing list that mail “from” intuit.com was being filed in the gmail spam folder, with the warning “Our systems couldn’t verify that this message was really sent by intuit.com“. That warning means that Gmail thinks it may be phishing mail. Given they’re a well-known financial services organization, I’m sure there is a lot of...
As a break from writing unit tests this morning I took a few minutes to go through my Mail.app junk folder, looking for false positives for mail delivered over the past six weeks. We don’t do any connection level rejection here, so any mail sent to me gets delivered somewhere. Anything that looks like malware gets dumped in one folder and never read, anything that scores a ridiculously high...
DMARC.org announced this morning that Gmail will be moving to publishing a p=reject DMARC record in June of next year, much the same as Yahoo and AOL have. Unlike Yahoo and AOL, Gmail are giving those who will be affected plenty of time to prepare for any issues, and have waited until there are some potential ways to mitigate problems in the development pipeline. The ARC proposal, mentioned in...
I just saw a post over on the mailop mailing list where someone had been bitten by some of the IPv6 email issues I discussed a couple of months ago. They have dual-stack smarthosts – meaning that their smarthosts have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, and will choose one or the other to send mail over. Some domains they send to use Office 365 and opted-in to receiving mail over IPv6, so their...
On Friday I talked a bit about the history behind TXT records, their uses and abuses. But what’s in a TXT record? How is it used? When and where should you use them? Here’s what you get if you query for the TXT records for exacttarget.com from a unix or OS X command line with dig exacttarget.com txt ~ ∙ dig exacttarget.com txt ; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>>...
When the Domain Name System was designed thirty years ago the concept behind it was pretty simple. It’s mostly just a distributed database that lets you map hostname / query-type pairs to values. If you want to know the IP address of cnn.com, you look up {cnn.com, A} and get back a couple of IP addresses. If you want to know where to send mail for aol.com users, you look up {aol.com, MX}...
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