It is a regular occurrence that senders ask filters and ISPs for mitigation. But there seems to be some confusion as to what mitigation really means. I regularly hear from senders who seem to think that once they’ve asked for mitigation that they don’t have to worry about filtering or blocking at that ISP for a while. They’re surprised when a few weeks or even days after they...
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...
It seems one of the most asked questions I hear from people is about filters and what the secret sauce is. Cloudmark’s processes which determine which IPs get a poor or suspect reputation in our CSI products, take into account many different factors, including both spam trap hits and volume of trusted end user complaints (hitting the “This is spam” button), reputation of the reverse DNS of the...
It seems some mail to Apple’s iCloud has been caught in filters. Apparently, a few months ago someone sent a script to a iCloud user that contained the phrase “barely legal teen” and Apple’s filters ate it. The amount of hysteria that I’ve seen in some places about this, though, seems excessive. One of my favorite quotes was from MacWorld and just tells me that many...
There was a recent question on a mailing list during a discussion of spam and delivery problems. A number of folks who work in delivery were discussing how a bad address got on a list. Someone who works on the spam blocking end of things asked why do you care how a bad address got onto a mailing list? For recipients, they usually don’t care. They just want the unsolicited mail to stop...
It’s a problem anyone who has done any delivery work has faced. There’s a client who is having blocklist problems or ISP delivery problems and they won’t pay any attention to what you say. They insist that you talk to the blocklist or the ISP or hand over contacts directly so they can “dialog with” someone internally. They don’t like what they’re hearing...
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