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September 1, 2015

Do system administrators have too much power?

By meri

6 Min read

4 comments

01September

Yesterday, Laura brought a thread from last week to my attention, and the old-school ISP admin and mail geek in me felt the need to jump up and say something in response to Paul’s comment. My text here is all my own, and is based upon personal experience as well as those of my friends. That said, I’m not speaking on their behalf, either. 🙂 I found Paul’s use of the word ‘SysAdmin’ to be a...

August 31, 2015

Politics and Delivery

By laura

4 Min read

1 comment

31August

Last week I posted some deliverability advice for the DNC based on their acquisition of President Obama’s 2012 campaign database. Paul asked a question on that post that I think is worth some attention. I am fascinated by the ramifications of email deliverability for political donations. Are there sysadmins at the big ISPs who make human decisions on deliverability issues anymore? The power...

July 20, 2015

Data is the key to deliverability

By laura

4 Min read

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20July

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking to the Sendgrid Customer Advisory Board about email and deliverability. As usually happens when I give talks, I learned a bunch of new things that I’m now integrating into my mental model of email. One thing that bubbled up to take over a lot of my thought processes is how important data collection and data maintenance is to deliverability. In fact...

January 28, 2015

Email filtering: not going away.

By laura

4 Min read

5 comments

28January

I don’t do a whole lot of filtering of comments here. There are a couple people who are moderated, but generally if the comments contribute to a discussion they get to be posted. I do get the occasional angry or incoherent comment. And sometimes I get a comment that is triggers me to write an entire blog post pointing out the problems with the comment. Today a comment from Joe King showed...

December 30, 2014

Top Commented Blog Posts on WttW in 2014

By josh

2 Min read

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30December

Here are the top 6 most commented on blog topics our Industry News & Analysis blog. In April, Laura wrote about the ins and outs about Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance also known as DMARC.  If you are not familiar with DMARC or want to know the differences between strict and relaxed alignment, read the blog post here. Earlier this year WttW’s website was...

November 10, 2014

URL reputation and shorteners

By laura

5 Min read

2 comments

10November

A bit of  a throwback post from Steve a few years ago. The problem has gotten a little better as some shortening companies are actually disabling spammed URLs, and blocking URLs with problematic content. I still don’t recommend using a public URL shortener in email messages, though. Any time you put a URL in mail you send out, you’re sharing the reputation of everyone who uses URLs with...

October 8, 2014

Does volume cause blocking?

By laura

1 Min read

9 comments

08October

There seems to be a never ending debate about volume and how it affects delivery and revenue. I regularly get questions asking if ISPs block senders just for volume. The answer is no. Unless you’re actually sending enough mail to overwhelm the incoming infrastructure, something that’s difficult on today’s internet, you’re unlikely to be blocked due to simply sending a high...

July 8, 2014

Don't wait to address delivery problems

By laura

2 Min read

1 comment

08July

One of the worst ways to deal with blocking issues is to ignore them and hope your mail magically moves from the bulk folder back into the inbox. While this does happen as ISPs and filter companies update their filters, it’s not that common and it’s usually the result of a sender actually cleaning up their sending processes and improving the quality of the mail they send. Do not...

May 6, 2014

Spam is not a moral judgement

By laura

2 Min read

4 comments

06May

Mention an email is spam to some senders and watch them dance around trying to explain all the ways they aren’t spammers. At some point, calling an email spam seems to have gone from a statement of fact into some sort of moral judgement on the sender. But calling an email spam is not a moral judgement. It’s just a statement of what a particular recipient thinks of an email. There are...

February 5, 2014

Contacting an ISP that doesn't have a postmaster page

By laura

3 Min read

3 comments

05February

How do you contact an ISP about a block that doesn’t have a postmaster page? While there’s no one answer, I do have some suggestions. Start by contacting the postmaster@ or abuse@ addresses. For smaller ISPs, the same people handling outbound abuse are the people handling inbound filtering. When you contact them have the following: What IPs you’re sending from. What the...