I’ve seen a bunch of folks in different places looking for advice on what to do when they can’t get a response from a postmaster team, or a filtering company. I was all set to write yet another post about how silence is an answer. Digging through the archives, though, I see I’ve written about this twice already in the last 18 months. Well. OK then. Instead of retreading...
A particular blocklist, once again, listed a major ESP this week. Their justification is “this is our policy.” Which is true, it is their policy to list under these circumstances. That doesn’t make it a good policy, or even an effective policy. It’s simply a policy. Crafting policies Crafting good policy starts with the question “what is the desired outcome in this...
First thing this morning I got an email from a client that they were listed on the UCEProtect Level 3 blacklist. Mid-morning I got a message from a different client telling me the same thing. Both clients shared their bounce messages with me: 550 Conexion rechazada por estar o167890x0.outbound-mail.sendgrid.net[167.89.0.0]:56628 en la DNSBL dnsbl-3.uceprotect.net (ver Your ISP LATINET –...
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...
Last week the megarbl.net domain name expired. Normally this would have no affect on anyone, but their domain registrar put in a wildcard DNS entry. Because of how DNSBLs work, this had the effect of causing every IP to be listed on the blocklist. The domain is now active and the listings due to the DNS wildcard are removed. How does a domain expiration lead to a DNSBL listing the whole internet...
I’m seeing some reports from various ESP folks that they’re experiencing an increase in Lashback listings the last day or so. They have contacted and are working with Lashback to identify what might be going on, if anything.
I’ll update once I know more and have permission to share.
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...
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...
Al has a good post listing the top 5 things senders should remember when dealing with blacklists. One of the critical things to remember about blocklists is that they are an early warning sign. Sure, some of them are one crank and his cat and will not hurt your overall delivery. A sender may be listed for totally spurious reasons . On the other hand, many of the widely used public lists and the...
With all the traveling I did last month, I’m still not back to full blogging speed. I have been slowly reading through the backlog of unread posts from my RSS feeds and there was lots of good stuff published. Three myths about DKIM by John Levine. A very good explanation taking down some of the myths of DKIM. Also on the DKIM front, RFC 5585 DKIM Service Overview was published last month...
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