Many blocklists use spamtraps to detect poor sending practices and will cite spamtrap hits as the reason for the blocks. Senders legitimately fear spamtraps showing up on their lists because of this. If spamtraps weren’t used by blocklists no one would really care about them. They’re just another kind of bad address. Yesterday I answered a question about whether or not spamtraps...
Recently, a significant majority of discussions of email delivery problems mention that neither the IPs or domains in use are on any of the public blocklists. I was thinking about this recently and realised that, sometime in the past, I stopped using blocklists as a source of useful information about reputation. I’m not even sure exactly when it happened. I just stopped checking most of the...
FADE IN EMAILGEEKS.SLACK.COM #email-deliverability It is morning in the channel. The regular crowd is around discussing the usual. JK, smart, competent head of deliverability at an ESP asks: Anyone familiar with SECTOOR EXITNODES listings and have insight into what’s going on if listed? ME: Uh, that’s the Tor Exit Nodes list. They think your IP is used by Tor. That’s all sorts...
Reading between the lines an important skill in deliverability. Why? Over the last few years there’s been an increasing amount of collaboration between deliverability folks at ESPs and ISPs. This is great. It’s a vast improvement on how things were 10 years ago. However, there are still ongoing complaints from both sides. There probably always will be. And it’s not like a blog...
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...
One of the questions we received during the EEC16 closing keynote panel was why isn’t there a single blocklist that everyone uses and why don’t ISPs share data more. It would be so much easier for senders if every ISP handled mail the same as every other. But the world isn’t that simple, and it’s not always clear which mail stream is spam and which is good mail. There were...
I tend to go back and forth about reporting spam these days. On one level I know that it’s all a numbers game, and policy enforcement is more about the quantity of complaints than the quality. Knowing this I don’t often send in complaints. I do make a few exceptions: when I know the policy enforcement team or when it’s a current or former client. The responses I’ve gotten...
I did an interview with Practical eCommerce a few weeks ago. The podcast and transcript are now available.
I want to thank Kerry and the rest of the staff there for the opportunity to talk email and filtering with their readers.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone in the US.
I wrote earlier this week about bad ways to evaluate and choose an ESP. It was all going to end today in an insightful and profound post telling all of you exactly how to find the best ESP. Then Smartinsights published an insightful and useful article on choosing an ESP yesterday. So, yeah, just go read what Jordie has to say. I have a couple other things to add, but I’ll drop those in...
Yesterday, I looked at the analysis of ESP delivery done by Mr. Geake. Today we’ll look at some of his conclusions. “Being blacklisted most likely suggests that sender IP either sends out to a great deal of unknown or angry recipients.” That’s not how most blocklists work. Most blocklists are driven by spam traps or by the personal mailboxes of the list maintainers. The...
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