It has been a rather busy day today, I do not have a full blog post. I did see a couple posts come across my RSS feeds. Both of them have content I want to talk about and discuss in a little more detail, as I think they touched on some very interesting issues. Network World has an article interviewing Mark Risher from Yahoo. The article discusses Yahoo’s use of DomainKeys as part of their...
ESP unwittingly used to send spam
Late last week I heard from someone at AOL they were seeing strange traffic from a major ESP, that looked like the ESP was an open relay. This morning I received an email from AOL detailing what happened as relayed by the ESP. IronPort Open Relay Vulnerability Systems Affected IronPort A60 running software version 2.5.4-005. According to IronPort, later devices and software versions using the...
Predictions for 2008
I did not have a lot of predictions for what will happen with email at the beginning of the year so I did not do a traditional beginning of the year post. Over the last 3 – 4 weeks, though, I have noticed some things that I think show where the industry is going. Authentication. In January two announcements happened that lead me to believe most legitimate mail will be DK/DKIM signed by the...
SenderScore Certified expands
ReturnPath announced yesterday that SenderScore Certified now covers 1.2 billion inboxes, including mail handled by Hotmail, Time Warner Cable, GoDaddy and eventually Yahoo. A number of filters are also using SSC, including Spam Assassin, IronPort Systems, Barracuda Networks and Cloudmark.
e360 in court again
Today’s edition of Magilla Marketing announced that Dave Linhardt and e360 have sued Comcast. Spamsuite.com has the text of the complaint up. On the surface this seems quite silly. e360 is alleging a number of things, including that Comcast is committing a denial of service attack against e360 and locking up e360’s servers for more than 5 hours. Additionally, e360 is laying blame at...
Do you know where your addresses go?
Being a deliverability consultant, I end up signing up for a lot of lists and providing email addresses to a lot of different websites I may not normally trust with my email address. The only way to manage the resulting volume of email is using a disposable address system. There are a number of commercial versions, but we built our own system. Any time I need to sign up with a client, I create a...
Yahoo and Spamhaus
Yahoo has updated and modified their postmaster pages. They have also put a lot of work into clarifying their response codes. The changes should help senders identify and troubleshoot problems without relying on individual help from Yahoo. There is one major change that deserves its own discussion. Yahoo is now using the SBL, XBL and PBL to block connections from listed IP addresses. These are...
SenderScore update
Matt has posted a bit more about the SenderScore Blacklist, following up on my post about the changes at Comcast. George Bilbrey, VP and General Manager, for Return Path followed up with him to explain a bit more about the blacklist. George says: The blacklist is based on more than the summary Sender Score on average, IPs on the blacklist have a score much, much less than 70. There is not a...
Best practices and ISPs
A couple articles came out today talking about ISP requirements and how to find them.
EmailInsider talks about ISP best practices and how merely complying with CAN-SPAM is not enough to get good delivery at the ISPs.
Meanwhile, over at ClickZ, Stefan talks about what the ISPs want from you and how to find the information online.
Email standards at the email client
The Email Standards Project launched last week. This group is looking to lobby and encourage companies to make their email clients comply with HTML display standards. They are also identifying how different clients display email with HTML. Check out their website, and see what they’re doing. I do apologize for the light blogging recently. I have a couple big deadlines on my plate. I hope to...