Tagdomains

November 5, 2019

Identifying domains that don’t accept or send email

By laura
2 Min read
1 comment
05November

A couple folks have asked me recently about MX records that they don’t understand. These records consist of a single . or they contain localhost or they are 127.0.0.1. In all cases, the domain owners use these records to signal that the domains don’t accept email. What do these records look like? Why do domains do this? In all cases it’s because the domain owners want to signal...

January 5, 2018

What … is your name?

By steve
2 Min read
2 comments
05January

For some reason otherwise legitimate ESPs have over the years picked up a habit of obfuscating who they are. I don’t mean those cases where they use a customers subdomain for their infrastructure or bounce address. If the customer is Harper Collins then mail “from” @bounce.e.harpercollins.com sent from a server claiming to be mail3871.e.harpercollins.com isn’t unreasonable...

July 26, 2017

Domain management

By laura
2 Min read
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26July

Yesterday one of the bigger ESPs had their domain registration lapse. This caused a whole host of problems for their customers. It was resolved when someone completely unrelated to the company paid the registration fee. It happens. Most of us know about cases where email or domains were lost due to renewal failures. The canonical case is one person at the company handles renewals, and leaves or...

March 13, 2015

thirty.years.com

By steve
2 Min read
2 comments
13March

Thirty years ago this Sunday, symbolics.com was registered – the first .com domain. It was followed, within a few months, by bbn.com, think.com, mcc.com and dec.com. Symbolics made lisp machines – symbolics.com is now owned by a domain speculator. BBN is a technology R&D company who’ve worked on everything. If I had to pick one thing they were involved with it’d be the...

March 27, 2014

Domains need to be warmed, too

By laura
1 Min read
3 comments
27March

One thing that came out of the ISP session at M3AAWG is that domains need to be warmed up, too. I can’t remember exactly which ISP rep said it, but there was general nodding across the panel when this was said. This isn’t just the domain in the reverse DNS of the sending IP, but also domains used in the Return Path (Envelope From) and visible from. From the ISP’s perspective...

November 13, 2013

Yahoo now auctioning domain names

By laura
2 Min read
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13November

This summer Yahoo shook up the email ecosystem by publicly announcing they were recycling usernames. The shakeup wasn’t so much that they were recycling usernames, but that they did it in a way that compromised user information and account security. Any user that had an account tied to a recycled Yahoo account is at risk for having their PII leaked. Folks are still dealing with the fallout...

March 16, 2012

Proxy registrations and commercial email

By laura
2 Min read
3 comments
16March

Yesterday the law firm Venable, LLP published a document discussing the recent California appellate court decision in Balsam v. Trancos. Their take is that commercial email that contains a generic from line and is sent from a proxied domain is a violation of the California Business and Professions Code § 17529.5(a)(2). The Trancos decision affects marketers using email to drive traffic to their...

March 7, 2012

CA court requires sender identification on emails

By laura
2 Min read
2 comments
07March

Venkat analyzes the appeals court decision in Balsam v. Trancos, Inc.. In this case the appeals court decided that emails have to identify some actual person or entity they are sent by or from. Emails that do not identify the sender are in violation of the California anti-spam statute. Venkat talks about all the reasons he thinks this is a problematic ruling, and the CA courts and anti-spam...

March 1, 2010

News and announcements: March 1, 2010

By laura
2 Min read
1 comment
01March

Some news stories and links today. Spamhaus has announced their new domain block list (DBL). The DBL is a list of domains that have been found in spam. The DBL is managed as a “zero false-positive” list, safe to use by production mail systems to reject emails that are flagged by it. The DBL includes URIs (domains/hostnames) which are used in spam including phishing...

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