Yesterday Gmail announced a change to their UI. This new UI lets users configure tabs in their inbox for different sorts of email. This change has greatly upset some marketers. Yesterday I heard it described as war on marketers, as a conspiracy to stop all email marketing and as a horrible injustice to legitimate marketers. I even saw a few people call for an organized boycott of Google AdWords...
Microsoft has a new TV ad showing how trivial it is to remove unwanted email from the inbox. Various busy people use the “sweep” and “delete” functions to clean up mail. The commercial even have a segment counting up the hundreds of emails deleted. This tells me a few things. Email isn’t dead. Major companies are still investing in email products and creating tools...
A lot of my sales inquiries recently are about getting good inbox delivery at Gmail. I’ve mentioned before, I can usually tell when an ISP changes things because they suddenly become the subject of a great many phone calls. In this case, Gmail seems to have turned up their engagement filters and is sending a lot more mail to the bulk folder. I have also noticed other people are blogging...
After they were a a little embarrassed by their own DKIM keys being poorly managed a few months ago, Google seem to have been going through their inbound DKIM handling and tightening up on their validation so that badly signed mail that really shouldn’t be treated as DKIM signed, won’t be treated as signed by Gmail. This is a good thing, especially as things like DMARC start to be...
As an update to yesterday’s post, Gmail is contacting postmasters at domains signing with 512 bit keys to warn them of the upcoming changes. This message also clarifies “DKIM keys failing.” Messages signed with 512 bit keys or less will be treated as unsigned by Gmail in the next week or so. Hello, We noticed that your domain is sending email to Gmail users that is DKIM signed...
While we were at M3AAWG, Wired published an article talking about how simple it was to crack DKIM keys. I didn’t post about it at the time because it didn’t really seem like news. DKIM keys smaller than 1024 are vulnerable and not secure and the DKIM spec does not recommend using keys smaller than 1024. When I asked the DKIM-people-who-would-know they did tell me that the news was...
Derek Harding has a pair of articles on ClickZ about Gmail giving their users information about why a particular email message was filtered.
What Gmail Teaches Us about Spam Filtering
Gmail Filtering: The Spam Disposition
Both articles are worth a read. They talk about what we know about Gmail and what we can infer from the data they provide to senders.
There was a question submitted today about the verification process at Gmail. even though SPF authentication is passed, a via is added to mail sent from a webserver. The return-path is not the same as the visible from field, but there’s no way for me to change it. Does that mean I won’t be able to get rid of the via? This actually ties in to some research Steve and I did a few months ago about...
Earlier this week Gmail announced they were providing reasons for why they delivered a particular mail to the bulk folder. I’m sure a lot of senders are rejoicing over the clear feedback. After all this is exactly what they’ve been asking for “tell us why you’re filtering our mail and we’ll fix it.” I am not sure, however, that this is going to help the...
ISPs are continually developing tools for their users. Some of the newer tools are automatic filters that help users organize the volumes of mail they’re getting. Gmail released Priority Inbox over a year ago. Hotmail announced new filters as part of Wave 5 back in October. All of these announcements cause much consternation in the email marketing industry. Just today there was a long...
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