Over the last few weeks I’ve seen a couple people get on mailing lists and make pronouncements about email. It’s great to have opinions and it’s great to share them. But they’re always a little bit right… and a little bit wrong. SPF is dead! This came from the new ESP of an experienced mailer. They were recommending not publishing SPF records because it was “an...
A bit of older news, but worth a blog post. Early in August, Gmail announced changes to the inbox on both the web interface and the android client. They will be pushing authentication results into the interface, so end users can see which emails are authenticated. These are not deliverability changes, the presence or absence of authentication will not affect inbox delivery. And the gmail Gmail...
I’ve been seeing reports for the last few weeks that a lot of folks are having problems getting mail into BT Internet. Many people are reporting the response smtp;554 Message rejected for policy reasons (3.2.2.1) – Please report any problems to BT via the postmaster btinternet.com mailbox and include your sending ip address with an example header of your email Unfortunately, the...
We got to slow down — and even take a brief vacation — in July, but we still managed to do a bit of blogging here and there, which I’ll recap below in case you missed anything. At the beginning of the month, I wrote about email address harvesting from LinkedIn. As you might imagine, I’m not a fan. A permissioned relationship on social media does not equate to permission to email...
The most read post on the blog is Authenticating with SPF: -all or ~all. In fact, it’s in the top 5 posts every single day. We still get comments on it, too. Usually from folks who disagree with my recommendations. I still stand by my recommendations, though. It doesn’t really matter if you choose ~all or -all in your SPF records. Why? No major provider is rejecting mail solely...
There are so many moving parts to ensure good email deliverability. Email marketers need to know marketing, they need to know email and they need to know design. The technical bits of email can be a challenge to learn, and many folks who write tutorials and How-Tos write them for a different audience than marketers. One of the things I’m trying to do is demystify the technical end of email...
Dear Laura, I’m a little confused by the term “no auth / no entry”. Gmail and other major receivers seem to be moving towards requiring authentication before they’ll even consider delivery. Does this just mean SPF and DKIM, or does this mean the much more stringent DMARC, as well? Thanks, No Shirt, No Shoes, No What Now? Shirtless & Shoeless, “No auth / no entry” is...
Happy April! I’m just back from the EEC conference in New Orleans, which was terrific. I wrote a quick post about a great session on content marketing, and I’ll have more to add about the rest of the conference over the next week or so. Stay tuned! Here’s a look at what caught our attention in March: On the DMARC front, we noted that both Yahoo and mail.ru are moving forward with p=reject, and...
Dear Laura, I heard recently that both Gmail and Yahoo will require DMARC authentication in early 2016 or images will be automatically blocked. Is that correct? And if so, do you know when they will be requiring DMARC? A DMARC-Overwhelmed Admin Dear Overwhelmed, There are three things going on here, all of which are related to DMARC but are very different in how it affects mail delivery...
I talked on Monday about the SPF rule of ten and how it made it difficult for companies to use multiple services that send email on their behalf. Today I’m going to look at how to fix things, by shrinking bloated SPF records. This is mostly aimed at those services who send email on their customers behalf and ask their customers to include an SPF record as that’s the biggest pain...
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