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As the volume and severity of malicious email increases, filters are increasingly following links in emails. This is really nothing new. Barracuda and other filters have been inspecting links automatically for years. From what I’ve seen there does seem to be some level of risk analysis based on domain reputation. That makes sense, not only is following links computationally expensive, it...
The question came up on slack and I started bullet pointing what would make a domain suspicious. Seemed like a reasonable blog post. In no particular order, some features that make a domain suspicious to spam filters. Domain is used in… … mail users complain about … mail users delete without reading … mail sent in bulk through the ISP (example: Censorship, Email and...
Never add someone to a mailing list without giving them a heads up that you’re doing it. It’s just uncool and rude. For example, I have been contacting some vendors about some work we need done. One of them has yet to answer my inquiry, but has already added me to their newsletter. Even worse, I had no idea submitting a form asking about their services would get me on their mailing...
I was on a call with a client today and they wanted to talk about the handshake agreement about bounce handling I mentioned last week. As I started to really talk about it, I realised how much has changed in the years since that meeting. It was a bit of the wild west of email and spam. CAN SPAM didn’t exist. Gmail didn’t exist. Global email volume, even including spam probably...
Bounces and bounce handling is one of those topics I’ve avoided writing about for a long time. Part of my avoidance is because there are decades of confusing terminology that hasn’t ever been really defined. Untangling that terminology is the first step to being able to talk sensibly about what to do. Instead of writing a giant long post, I can break it into smaller, more focused...
One of the big topics of discussion in various deliverability circles is the problems many places are seeing with delivery to Microsoft properties. One of the challenges is that Microsoft seems to be happy with how their filters are working, while senders are seeing vastly different data. I started thinking about reporting, how we generate reports and how do we know the reports are correct...
The other day I tweeted that I often used the term “receivers” to describe receiving MTAs. Whenever I use the term “receivers” to discuss email filters, I think of JD and Madkins telling me that receivers send mail, too. And they do. But I haven’t found a better term for “groups that receive and filter lots of mail.” #deliverability #emailgeek — Laura Atkins (@wise_laura)...
A few years ago reputation was generally recognised as one thing. If a sending reputation or IP reputation was good in one place it was likely good in other places. Different entities mostly reputation using the same set of signals albeit slightly tweaked to meet their own needs. More recently there is a divergence in how reputation is measured, meaning delivery can be vastly different across...
Over the past few years a number of email delivery products have been launched. Many of these products are intended to improve deliverability by improving metrics. The problem is they don’t work the way their purchasers thing. Take data hygiene services. For the most part, these services take a list of email addresses, do data analysis and magic and then return a “clean” list to...
Yesterday the NJABL domain expired. The list was disabled back in 2013 but the domain continued to be maintained as a live domain. With the expiration, it was picked up by domain squatters and is now listing everything. Steve wrote about how and why expired blocklist domains list the world last year. The short version is, that when domain squatters grab a domain they put in a DNS entry that...
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