Between client work and our national political climate, it’s been a very busy month around here and blogging has been light. Things show no sign of slowing down in February, so we’d love to hear from you with questions and suggestions of what you’d most like to see us focus on in our limited blogging time this month. We got a great question about how senders can access their Google Postmaster...
There are often questions arising about how to go about getting off a particular blocklist. A few years ago I led the MAAWG effort to document what to if if you were On a Blocklist (pdf link). That document was aimed primarily at MAAWG members and deliverability experts with working knowledge of blocklists. I think, even now, it’s a good background on how to deal with a listing and mail...
There’s been a discussion on the mailop list about the number of different blocklists out there. There are discussions about whether we need so many lists, and how difficult the different lists make it to run a small mail system (80K or so users). This discussion wandered around a little bit, but started me thinking about how we got to a place where there are hundreds of different...
Brian Krebs posted a couple days ago about his experience with the subscription bomb over the weekend. He talks about just how bad it was over the weekend. At approximately 9:00 a.m. ET on Saturday, KrebsOnSecurity’s inbox began filling up with new newsletter subscriptions. The emails came in at a rate of about one new message every 2-3 seconds. By the time I’d finished deleting and unsubscribing...
Steve Linford, CEO of Spamhaus commented on my blog post about the current listings. I’m promoting it here as there is valuable information in it. Excellent well summarized article Laura ? No we’ve not changed SBL policy to require COI. It’s something we very strongly advise but we can not make a requirement. We’ll have to consider it if list-bombing of this magnitude can not be kept in...
A number of ESPs woke up to a more-than-usually-bad Monday morning. Last night Spamhaus listed 10s of networks, including ESPs, on the SBL. The listings all contained the following note: Problem description ============================ The newsletter service () is using the referenced IP address to send bulk email. Unfortunately, the said newsletter service is not verifying the email address of...
2014 has been a busy and exciting year at Word to the Wise (look for more on that in a year-end wrap-up post next week!) and this month was particularly thrilling for us as we officially doubled our size with the addition of Josh and Meri on our client services team. If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you’ve probably spotted Josh’s byline on a few posts: Google’s Inbox Team answers questions...
A couple links to relevant things that are happening in email. M3AAWG released the Help! I’m on a Blocklist! (PDF link) doc this week. This is the result of 4 years worth of work by a whole lot of people at M3AAWG. I was a part of the working group (“doc champion” in M3AAWG parlance) and want to thank everyone who was involved and contributed to the process. I am very excited...
Spamhaus recently announced a few years ago that they have discovered a company that is pirating various blocklists, relabeling them and selling access to them. Not only is the company distributing the zones, they’re also running a “pay to delist” scheme whereby senders are told if they pay money, they’ll be removed from the lists. The fake company does remove the listing...
I have gotten a lot of questions about Spamhaus since I’ve been talking about them on the blog and on various mailing lists. Those questions can be condensed and summed up into a single thought. What engagement metrics should I monitor to avoid a Spamhaus listing? First off Spamhaus doesn’t care about about engagement. Spamhaus wants you to stop mailing people who never asked to...
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