Some emails are more important than others. I know, I know, all emails are important, but really, some are more important than others. I’ve recently been decluttering by the simple expedient of enrolling in paperless statements for some of our accounts. We have a 1TB NAS, I’m not going to run out of storage space and I will have so much less paper to deal with. Plus, electronic...
A few weeks ago I was alerted to a domain change for INGDirect. The ingdirect.com domain is being retired and all users are migrating to the capitalone.com domain. As part of this change usernames are NOT being transferred, so if you have @ingdirect.com addresses on any B2B mailing list, you will need to drop those addresses and find the new contact information for the subscriber. What should...
There are a bunch of them and they’re all worth reading. I have more to say about DMARC, both in terms of advice for senders and list managers affected by this, and in terms of the broader implications of this policy decision. But those articles are going to take me a little longer to write. How widespread is the problem? Andrew Barrett publishes numbers, pulled from his employer, related...
This week’s Wednesday question comes from D. What are your thoughts on bounce handling There’s no specific standard for bounce handling as we often talk about it. While a lot of people will mention the RFCs, the RFCs only say what to do with a single email that gets a 4xy or a 5xy during the SMTP transaction. If the message gets a 5xy during the SMTP transaction, then the email MUST...
In the comments of last week’s Wednesday question John B. asked Can you elaborate on specifics of “configure machines to not look like spam ware”? There are a lot of things that spamware does that is different from a lot of standard MTAs. Here are a list of things that may make your mail look like it is running spamware to a receiving server. Using weird values for HELO/EHLO, like a bare IP...
I’m working on stuff for MAAWG so I’m really not all that up on what’s happening in the world of email recently. A lot of folks are commenting on my AOL post, and I’m hearing that queues are backing up and emptying as AOL makes changes. One thing people have been asking me is if they should retry mail to the addresses that are bouncing. I say yes, absolutely. Some of the...
In the email delivery space there are a lot of numbers we talk about including bounce rates, complaint rates, acceptance rates and inbox delivery rates. These are all good numbers to tell us about a particular campaign or mailing list. Usually these metrics all track together. Low bounce rates and low complaint rates correlate with high delivery rates and high inbox placement. But sometimes the...
I am a strong believer that bounce handling should be designed to remove addresses that have no human on the other end while not removing addresses that have a real recipient on the other end. Bounce handling should be designed to appropriately manage your subscriber base. Delivery problems are the consequence if you don’t do that. They shouldn’t be the reason you bounce handle...
James from Cloudmark has his own insight on spamtraps.
I have a mail system totally separate from my inbox to use when I’m testing signup forms. Some of them are client, some of them are vendors my clients are thinking about using. In any case, it’s mail I’m seriously concerned won’t stop just by me opting out of it. The server hosting that mail system has been flakey lately, and needs to be hard power cycled to make it come...
RSS - Posts