Tagfilters

September 1, 2015

Do system administrators have too much power?

By meri

6 Min read

4 comments

01September

Yesterday, Laura brought a thread from last week to my attention, and the old-school ISP admin and mail geek in me felt the need to jump up and say something in response to Paul’s comment. My text here is all my own, and is based upon personal experience as well as those of my friends. That said, I’m not speaking on their behalf, either. 🙂 I found Paul’s use of the word ‘SysAdmin’ to be a...

August 31, 2015

Politics and Delivery

By laura

4 Min read

1 comment

31August

Last week I posted some deliverability advice for the DNC based on their acquisition of President Obama’s 2012 campaign database. Paul asked a question on that post that I think is worth some attention. I am fascinated by the ramifications of email deliverability for political donations. Are there sysadmins at the big ISPs who make human decisions on deliverability issues anymore? The power...

August 13, 2015

Pattern matching primates

By laura

3 Min read

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13August

Why do we see faces where there are none? Paradolia Why do we look at random noise and see patterns? Patternicity Why do we think we have discovered what’s causing filtering if we change one thing and email gets through? It’s all because we’re pattern matching primates, or as Michael Shermer puts it “people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe...

May 6, 2015

4 things spammers do legitimate marketers don't

By laura

4 Min read

3 comments

06May

I’ve never met a spammer that claims to be a spammer. Most that I’ve met claim to be legitimate marketers (or high volume email deployers). But there are things spammers do that I never expect to see a legitimate marketer doing. I’ve written about these things throughout the blog (tag: TWSD), but it’s probably time to actually pull them together into a single post. Use...

April 2, 2015

What to do when an important email bounces

By laura

2 Min read

2 comments

02April

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...

March 30, 2015

Thoughts on Gmail filtering

By laura

1 Min read

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30March

Gmail has some extremely complex filters. They’re machine learning based and measure hundreds of things about incoming mail. The filters are continually adjusting to changes and updating how they treat specific mail. One consequence of continually adjusting machine learning filters is that filtering is not static. What passes to the inbox now, may not pass in a couple hours. One of the...

March 23, 2015

When spam filters fail

By laura

2 Min read

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23March

Spam filters aren’t perfect. They sometimes catch mail they shouldn’t, although it happens less than some people think. They sometimes fail to catch mail they should. One of the reason filters fail to catch mail they should is because some spammers invest a lot of time and energy in figuring out how to get past the filters. This is nothing new, 8 or 9 years ago I was in negotiations...

January 13, 2015

Language as filtering criteria

By laura

1 Min read

2 comments

13January

A few months ago I was working on a delivery audit for a client who sends mail in multiple languages. We discovered that the language of an email has a significant delivery impact. The same email in different languages was delivered differently, particularly at Gmail. Emails in a language I don’t normally receive email in were delivered to my bulk folder. Other folks have commented on...

January 9, 2015

AHBL Wildcards the Internet

By josh

3 Min read

11 comments

09January

AHBL (Abusive Host Blocking List) is a DNSBL (Domain Name Service Blacklist) that has been available since 2003 and is used by administrators to crowd-source spam sources, open proxies, and open relays.  By collecting the data into a single list, an email system can check this blacklist to determine if a message should be accepted or rejected. AHBL is managed by The Summit Open Source Development...

November 11, 2014

Email problems are costly

By laura

1 Min read

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11November

Last week Zulily released their quarterly earnings. Their earnings’ report was disappointing, resulting in a drop in their stock prices. The chairman of the company told reporters on a conference call that part of the reason for the drop in earnings were due to deliverability problems “at a large ISP.” Zulily ran into problems with a large email provider — issues which resulted...