There always seems to be appetite from folks to read the tea leaves and follow up with predictions about what the future holds. I mean, how many folks in the US are obsessively refreshing polls for the last few weeks? (American’s: don’t forget to vote on Tuesday!) The reality is, though, we don’t know what the future holds and we can’t always make predictions. I’ve...
Welcome to deliverability week. I want to especially thank Al for doing a lot of work behind the scenes herding this group of cats. He’s an invaluable asset to the community. The topic today is why deliverability matters to me. Until I started writing this, I hadn’t really thought about it much. Like most folks, I kinda fell into deliverability. I still describe myself as a scientist...
One of the most common refrains I hear from folks with delivery problems is that the filters must have changed because their mail suddenly started to go to the bulk folder. A few years ago, I posted about how even when there is no change in the sender’s behavior, reputation can slowly erode until mail suddenly goes to the Gmail bulk folder. Much of that still applies – although the...
These last few years have been something, huh? Something had to give and, in my case, that something was blogging. There were a number of reasons I stopped writing here, many of them personal, some of them more global. I will admit, I was (and still am a little) burned out as it seemed I was saying and writing the same things I’d been saying and writing for more than a decade. Taking time...
Every once in a while we’ll see a rejection from Yahoo that says RFCs 554 5.0.0 Message not accepted due to failed RFC compliance. What does that mean and what can we do about it? It really does mean exactly what it says on the label: there’s something about the message that is not in compliance with any number of RFCs and are not going to accept the message in its current state. When...
I regularly see folks asking how to fix their Gmail delivery. This is a perennial question (see my 2019 post and the discussions from various industry experts in the comments). Since that discussion I haven’t seen as much complaining about problems. There are steps that work to get delivery fixed at Gmail. Verify that your mail is actually going to bulk. I had one client that had a bad /...
I’ve seen reports that someone is asserting that utm=COVID19 in URLs results in all mail going to bulk at multiple ISPs. This is the type of thing that someone says is true and dozens of folks believe it and thus a “deliverability phact” is born. For a plethora of reasons, this doesn’t pass the sniff test. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. It’s...
More than 30 people joined our delivery discussion from last Wednesday evening (Irish time). Thanks to all who joined and participated. I had a number of different topic suggestions, but the thing on everyone’s mind was the current pandemic and how much email many of our customers, clients, and companies are sending. We had what I think was a productive discussion sharing information and...
As I continue to think about how people troubleshoot email delivery I keep finding other things to talk about. Today we’re going to talk about the question most folks start with when troubleshooting delivery. “Did ISP change something?” At least once a week I check some delivery or email fora and some form of the question is sitting there. “Did X change something? We...
One of the things I do for clients is look at who is really handling mail for their subscribers. Steve’s written a nifty tool that does a MX lookup for a list of domains. Then I have a SQL script that takes the raw MX lookup and categorizes not by the domain or even the MX, but by the underlying mail filter. Part of that script classifies domains hosted by Google apps as a separate filter...
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