TagReputation

Reputation is about behavior

Reputation is calculated based on actions. Send mail people want and like and interact with and get a good reputation. Send mail people don’t want and don’t like and don’t interact with and get a bad reputation.   Reputation is not … about who the sender is. … about legitimacy. … about speech. … about message. Reputation is … about sender...

Old Lists and RadioShack

RadioShack is putting their assets up for sale including more than 65 million customer records and 13 million email addresses. Many are up in arms about the sale of personal data including the Texas Attorney General and AT&T who both want the data destroyed. Part of the controversy is that RadioShack’s privacy policy states the collected data will be only used by RadioShack and its...

Updated M3AAWG Best Practices for Senders

M3AAWG has published a new version of the Senders Best Common Practices document and the contains a lot of new information since the original publication in 2008. The new document covers how to vet ESP customers, considerations when selecting a dedicated or share IP to send mail, and includes best practices on a number of technical processes. The Senders Best Common Practices document is targeted...

Brief DBL false positive

A code glitch in a new DBL sub-zone known as 'Abused-Legit' caused the new Abused-Legit zone to list ".net." for 60 minutes from 08:35 UTC. — Spamhaus (@spamhaus) December 17, 2014 Spamhaus are rolling out a new subzone of the DBL, for domains whose webservers have been compromised and used to host spam landing pages, often via mass compromises of their management control...

URL reputation and shorteners

A bit of  a throwback post from Steve a few years ago. The problem has gotten a little better as some shortening companies are actually disabling spammed URLs, and blocking URLs with problematic content. I still don’t recommend using a public URL shortener in email messages, though. Any time you put a URL in mail you send out, you’re sharing the reputation of everyone who uses URLs with...

IP Reputation

A throwback post from a few years ago on IP reputation. Why IP addresses? ISPs built reputation around IP addresses because it was one bit of data that malicious senders / spammers couldn’t forge. The connecting IP is a fundamental part of the network transaction and if you forge an IP then SMTP can’t work. Because that was the reliable data they had to work with, that’s what they used. Even now...

Domains need to be warmed, too

One thing that came out of the ISP session at M3AAWG is that domains need to be warmed up, too. I can’t remember exactly which ISP rep said it, but there was general nodding across the panel when this was said. This isn’t just the domain in the reverse DNS of the sending IP, but also domains used in the Return Path (Envelope From) and visible from. From the ISP’s perspective...

Is Amazon SES a reputable place to send mail from

On the first installment of our Wednesday question series, I chose a question from twitter. Can you advise is Amazon SES is a reputable place to send email from? @inkpixelspaper This is a great question. In many cases the reputation of a provider doesn’t affect delivery, but as with almost everything in email there are exceptions and cases where a poor provider reputation may affect...

Reputation is more complex than a single number

I checked our SenderScore earlier this month, as quite a few people mentioned that they’d seen SenderScore changes – likely due to changed algorithms  and new data sources. It sure looks like something changed. Our SenderScore was, for a while, zero out of a hundred. That’s as bad as it’s possible to get. I didn’t get a screenshot of the zero score, but I grabbed...

Hunting the Human Representative

Yesterday’s post was inspired by a number of questions I’ve fielded recently from people in the email industry. Some were clients, some were colleagues on mailing lists, but in most cases they’d found a delivery issue that they couldn’t solve and were looking for the elusive Human Representative of an ISP. There was a time when having a contact inside an ISP was almost...

Recent Posts

Archives

Follow Us