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...
I stumbled across this story again this morning, and it’s such a lovely delivery yarn I thought I’d share it. It’s from Trey Harris, and it’s set in the mid 90s. Here's a problem that *sounded* impossible... I almost regret posting the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a conference. :-) The story is slightly altered in order to protect...
Some notes on some of the different protocols used for authentication and authentication-adjacent things in email. Some of this is oral history, and some of it may be contradicted by later or more public historical revision. SPF Associates an email with a domain that takes responsibility for it. Originally Sender Permitted From, now Sender Policy Framework. It allows a domain owner to announce...
I was doing some research today for an article I’m working on. The research led me to a San Francisco Law Review article from 2001 written by David E. Sorkin. Technical and Legal Approaches to Unsolicited Electronic Mail (.pdf link). The text itself is a little outdated, although not as much as I expected. There’s quite a good discussion of various ways to control spam, most of which...
Back in 2014, Steve wrote an article discussing Shiva Ayyadurai,and his claims that he was the inventor of email. In that article he links to a number of articles from Techdirt. Earlier this year, Shiva sued Floor64, the parent company of Techdirt, as well as Michael Massnick the Founder, CEO and editor and Leigh Beadon, a writer for Techdirt. (Original Complaint pdf from ReCAP). Ars Technica has...
A “/8” is a block of 16,777,214 usable IP addresses. That’s a big fraction of the entire IPv4 address space – about 1/224, in fact. Each one is all the addresses that begin with a given number: 10.0.0.0/8 is all the IP addresses that begin with “10.”, “184.0.0.0/8” (or “184/8” for short) is all the IP addresses that begin with “184...
In my previous career I studied the effect of alcohol on developing embryos. It’s a bit weird I ended up in that field because embryological development always seemed to complex to me. And it was and is complicated. In a lot of ways, though, it was good training for deliverability. We dealt with a lot of processes that seem, on the surface, straightforward. Fertilization happens, then you...
A few moments ago, I cancelled one of my email addresses. This is an address that has been mine since somewhere around 1993 or 4. It was old enough to vote. And now it’s no more. I am not even sure why I kept it for so long. It was my dialup account back when I was in grad school in Delaware. When I moved to Madison to work at the university, I kept it as a shell account and email address...
For a long time it was a known fact that certain ISPs recycled abandoned addresses into spamtraps. There were long discussions by senders about this process and how it happened. Then at a conference a few years ago representatives of ISPs got up and announced that they do not recycle addresses. This led to quite a bit of consternation about how deliverability folks were making things up and were...
My first access to “the internet” was through a dialup modem on a VAX at the FDA. I was a summer intern there through my college career and then worked full time after graduation and before grad school. My email address ended in .bitnet. I could mail some places but not others. One of the places I couldn’t send mail was to my friends back on campus. A few of those friends were...
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