Happy March! Here’s a look back at our last month of email adventures. It was a busy few weeks for us with the M3AAWG meeting in San Francisco. We saw lots of old friends and met many new people — all in all, a success, despite the M3AAWG plague we both contracted. Hot topics at the conference included DMARC, of course, and I took the opportunity to write up a guide to help you determine if...
Catching up from MAAWG SF
Had a great time a M3AAWG last week. So many familiar faces and a lot of new ones, too. I’ve got a lot of interesting stuff that I can share with readers over the next few days. One of the things I have received permission to share is the new Office 365 IP delisting link. I botched the first time I posted it, so I’m going to try again. Office 365 IP Delisting Page. Many thanks to the...
Should you publish DMARC?
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about DMARC. Being at M3AAWG has increased that. Last night we were at dinner and heard from the next table “And they’re not even publishing DMARC!!!!” I know DMARC is the future. I know folks are going to have to start publishing DMARC records. I also know that the protocol is the future. I am also not sure that most companies are ready for...
Ask Laura: Confused about Authentication
Dear Laura, I have a client moving from an external ESP to an internal system. They send approximately eight million messages per year, and these are primarily survey emails on behalf of their clients. We’ve had some conversations about authentication, and I’m trying to help them figure out if they just need DMARC or if they also need DKIM and SPF. It seems some ISPs prefer different methods, and...
What to expect in 2016
I don’t always do predictions posts, even though they’re popular. Most years I skip them because I don’t see major changes in the email space. And, I’m not the type to just write a prediction post just to post a prediction. This year, though, I do see changes for everyone in the email space. Most of them center on finally having to deal with the technical debt that’s been accumulating over the...
Confusing the engineers
We went camping last weekend with a bunch of friends. Had a great time relaxing on the banks of the Tuolumne River, eating way too much and visiting. On Saturday I was wearing a somewhat geeky t-shirt. It said 554: abort mission. (Thank you MessageSystems). At some point on Saturday every engineer came up to me, read my shirt and then looked at me and said “That’s not HTTP.”...
IPv6 and authentication
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...
The holiday mailing season
We’re half way through September and it seems way too early to start thinking about the holidays. But for marketers, even email marketers, planning should be starting now. This planning shouldn’t just be about content and targeting and segmentation, but should also cover deliverability. Most retailers use email marketing to drive traffic to their websites during the holidays. Experian...
Check your tech
One of the things we do for just about every new client coming into WttW is have them send us an email from their bulk mail system. We then check it for technical correctness. This includes things like reviewing all the different From headers, rDNS of the connecting IP, List-Unsubscribe headers and authentication. This is always useful, IMO, because we often find things that were right when they...
DMARC=BestGuessPass
Looking at the headers within the mail received with my Office365 domain I see dmarc=bestguesspass. BestGuessPass? That’s a new. A few days after seeing dmarc=bestguesspass, Terry Zink at Microsoft posted an explanation. Exchange Online Protection, the filtering system for Office365, is analyzing the authentication of incoming emails and if the domain is not publishing a DMARC record, EOP...