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...
As I continue to think about how people troubleshoot email delivery I keep finding other things to talk about. Today we’re going to talk about the question most folks start with when troubleshooting delivery. “Did ISP change something?” At least once a week I check some delivery or email fora and some form of the question is sitting there. “Did X change something? We...
Today Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign sued Google for $50 million. Why? Because during the night of the first debate Google disabled her “advertising account” (I’m assuming she means adwords) preventing her from being able to purchase ads to direct searchers to her website. There’s also a paragraph in there that they’re “disproportionally putting her email into...
Mimecast is a filter primarily used by businesses. They’re fairly widely used. In some of the data analysis I’ve done for clients, they’re a top 10 or top 20 filter. Earlier today someone asked on Facebook if mimecast may be blocking emails based on the TLD. The short answer is it’s unlikely. I’ve not seen huge issues with them blocking based on TLD of the domain...
AHBL (Abusive Host Blocking List) is a DNSBL (Domain Name Service Blacklist) that has been available since 2003 and is used by administrators to crowd-source spam sources, open proxies, and open relays. By collecting the data into a single list, an email system can check this blacklist to determine if a message should be accepted or rejected. AHBL is managed by The Summit Open Source Development...
Mention an email is spam to some senders and watch them dance around trying to explain all the ways they aren’t spammers. At some point, calling an email spam seems to have gone from a statement of fact into some sort of moral judgement on the sender. But calling an email spam is not a moral judgement. It’s just a statement of what a particular recipient thinks of an email. There are...
There’s been a lot of discussion about Spamhaus, spam traps, and blocking. Today, Spamhaus rep Denny Watson posted on the Spamhaus blog about some of the recent large retailer listings. He provides us with some very useful information about how Spamhaus works, and gives 3 case studies of recent listings specifically for transactional messages to traps. The whole thing is well worth a read...
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...
In the comments of last week’s Wednesday question John B. asked Can you elaborate on specifics of “configure machines to not look like spam ware”? There are a lot of things that spamware does that is different from a lot of standard MTAs. Here are a list of things that may make your mail look like it is running spamware to a receiving server. Using weird values for HELO/EHLO, like a bare IP...
Much like every other day, I got some spam today. Here’s a lightly edited copy of it. Let’s go through it and see what they did that makes it clear that it’s spam, which companies helped them out, and what you should avoid doing to avoid looking like these spammers… Received: from [213.144.59.132] (114.sub-75-210-142.myvzw.com [75.210.142.114] by m.wordtothewise.com...
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