Monthly Review

November 2017: The Month in Email

We’re in the thick of the busiest time of the year for email. It’s been so busy, in fact, that we’ve seen some slowdowns and delivery issues across the email universe. It may be worth thinking about alternate strategies for end of year promotions beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
I was delighted to chat with Julia Angwin for her ProPublica piece on subscription bombing and abuse prevention. Her piece is a good introduction to the topic, and very much worth reading.
ICYMI, I did a rough analysis of the data from our survey on Google Postmaster Tools. Stay tuned for more insights when I have a moment to explore this further.

September 2017: The Month in Email

Happy October! ‘Tis the season for “the scariest costumes to wear to an inbound marketing Halloween party”. Terrifying, right? A perfect occasion for spam-infused mai tais!

In other news from the blog in September, I wrote several posts about the Equifax breach, starting with the announcement of the compromise on September 7th and their utterly inadequate response, followed by more incompetence when they sent people to the wrong site to get assistance. I also noted some of the discussion around the various educational paths people working in information security have and why these are the wrong questions to ask.
Speaking of the various paths people take towards careers in email, I wrote a followup post on Shiva Ayyadurai, whose defamation suit around his claims to being the inventor of email was recently dismissed.
I wrote a few posts about Gmail, including a guide to improving Gmail delivery, and some specific advice on how to warm up your Gmail mailstream, which is somewhat different than other warmup processes. In other news on mail providers, it’s worth noting some recent changes Microsoft has made to various domains.
In best practices, Steve wrote about a nice series of emails we received following an online purchase and I wrote about properly monitoring your DMARC reports.
Every now and then, I like to return to the basics. My post on 10 Things Every Mailer Must Do is a handy overview to share with your team (or your customers, if you’re an ESP). If you’re having delivery challenges and haven’t tackled these top ten best practices, this is where you need to start. I wrote up some additional thoughts on how we think about deliverability that you might find useful as well.

July 2017: The month in email

August is here, and as usual, we’re discussing spam, permissions, bots, filters, delivery challenges, and best practices.

One of the things we see over and over again, both with marketers and with companies that send us email, is that permission is rarely binary — companies want a fair amount of wiggle room, or “implied permission” to send. There are plenty of examples of how companies try to dance around clear permissions, such as this opt form from a company we used to do business with. But there are lots of questions here: can you legitimately mail to addresses you haven’t interacted with in 5 years? 10 years? What’s the best way to re-engage, if at all?
We frequently get questions about how to address deliverability challenges, and I wrote up a post about some of the steps we take as we help our clients with this. These are short-term fixes; for long-term success, the most effective strategy is sending email that people want and expect. Engagement is always at the core of a sustainable email program.
We’ve also discussed the rise of B2B spam, and the ways in which marketing technologies contribute to the problem. B2B marketers struggle to use social and email channels appropriately to reach customers and prospects, but still need to be thoughtful about how they do it. I also wrote about some of the ways that marketing automation plugins facilitate spam and how companies should step up to address the problem. Here’s an example of what happens when the automation plugins go awry.
I wrote a few posts about domain management and the implications for security and fraud. The first was about how cousin domain names can set users up for phishing and fraud, and the second was a useful checklist for looking at your company’s domain management. We also looked at abuse across online communities, which is an increasing problem and one we’re very committed to fighting.
I also highlighted a few best practices this month: guidelines for choosing a new ESP and active buttons in the subject line for Gmail.
And finally, we celebrated the 80th birthday of the original SPAM. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably already know why unwanted email is called SPAM, but just in case, here’s a refresher….

April 2017: The Month in Email

April was a big travel month for us. I went to Las Vegas for meetings around the Email Innovations Summit and to New Orleans, where Steve spoke on the closing keynote panel for the EEC conference.
I wrote several posts this month about privacy and tracking, both in email and in other online contexts. It’s increasingly a fact of life that our behaviors are tracked, and I wrote about the need for transparency between companies and those they are tracking. More specifically, I talked about the tradeoffs between convenience and security, and how people may not be aware that they are making these tradeoffs when they use popular mailbox tools like unroll.me. The folks over at ReturnPath added a comment on that post about how they handle privacy issues with their mailbox tools.
Steve contributed several posts this month. First up, a due diligence story about how service providers might look more closely at potential customers for their messaging platforms to help curtail spam and other fraudulent activity. He also looked at the history of “/8” IP blocks, and what is happening to them as the internet moves to IPv6. Steve also added a note about his new DMARC Validation tool, which rounds out a suite of free tools we’ve made available on our site. And finally, he showcased a particularly great email subscription experience from Tor.com — have a look!
I highlighted another post about companies doing things right, this one by Len Shneyder over at Marketingland. In other best practices news, I talked about bounce handling again (I mentioned it last month too), and how complicated it can be. Other things that are complicated: responding to abuse complaints. Do you respond? Why or why not?
Our friends at Sendgrid wrote a great post on defining what spammers and other malicious actors do via email, which I think is a must-read for email marketers looking to steer clear of such activity. Speaking of malicious actors, I wrote two posts on the arrest of one of the world’s top email criminals, Peter Levashov, and speculation that he was involved in the Russian hacking activity around the US elections. We’re looking forward to learning more about that story as it unfolds.

March 2017: The Month in Email

It’s that time again… here’s a look at our last month of blog posts. We find it useful to recap each month, both to track trends and issues in email delivery and to provide a handy summary for those who aren’t following along breathlessly every single day. Let us know if you find it useful too!

As always, I wrote about email filters. It’s so important to recognize that filters aren’t arbitrary — they’re detailed instructions that help meet specific user needs, and the more you are cognizant of that, the better you’ll be able to work with them. Additionally, filters aren’t perfect and likely never will be. False positives and false negatives are frustrating, but as long as spam is still a viable business for spammers, they’ll continue to figure out how to work around filters. As such, we can’t expect filters to be 100% accurate in determining what constitutes wanted and unwanted mail.
Part of this, of course, is due to the problem of fraudulent signups. Companies aren’t particularly vigilant about address acquisition and hygiene, and as a result, they’ll claim you “signed up” for their email when you did not. Some people believe that a confirmed opt-in (COI) will solve this problem, but our experience is companies are reluctant to leave revenue on the table, and that they will continue to mail to addresses that have not confirmed.
Address sharing and co-reg is also part of the problem. As we saw in the extensive RCM data breach, many major brands continue to work with third-party senders to send mail in ways that are quite clearly spam. And in more criminal activity, I looked at the rise of botnets and how some of those criminals were brought to justice. In other justice news, there’s been an indictment in the Yahoo breach and another CASL enforcement action.
I wrote a post about bounce handling and “relaying denied” error messages, which are quite rare. It’s useful to have an understanding of these and other error messages, since bounces are sometimes indicative of a larger technical issue, such as when AOL accidentally bounced all messages for a short period last week. Speaking of AOL, we noted that there’s no official timeline for the move from Verizon addresses to AOL addresses following the 2015 acquisition, but it may be worth considering asking your customers to update their addresses.
Spam and filters aren’t the only factors of course. It can be challenging to figure out the multiple factors that make up the black box of delivery. And of course, the most important part of delivery continues to be engagement, engagement, engagement.
I wrote a few posts this month on why I do what I do, and why it’s so important to me. First, I wrote about A Day Without A Woman, and my choice not to participate in offering advice and guidance for that day. The truth is that I enjoy sharing what I know and helping people solve problems. I was honored to be named one of 11 Innovators in Email, and I know that my volunteer work in the industry and my unpaid blogging work is a big part of that. It may sound corny, but I really do believe we are on the front lines of the fight of good vs. evil online, and despite the distractions of politics and world events, we must all continue to do our part.

February 2017: The Month In Email

Happy March!

As always, I blogged about best practices with subscriptions, and shared a great example of subscription transparency that I received from The Guardian. I also wrote about what happens to the small pool of people who fail to complete a confirmed opt-in (or double opt-in) subscription process. While there are many reasons that someone might not complete that process, ultimately that person has not given permission to receive email, and marketers need to respect that. I revisited an older post on permission which is still entirely relevant.
Speaking of relevance, I wrote about seed lists, which can be useful, but — like all monitoring tools — should not be treated as infallible, just as part of a larger set of information we use to assess deliverability. Spamtraps are also valuable in that larger set of tools, and I looked at some of the myths and truths about how ISPs use them. I also shared some thoughts from an industry veteran on Gmail filtering.
On the topic of industry veterans, myths and truths, I looked at the “little bit right, little bit wrong” set of opinions in the world of email. It’s interesting to see the kinds of proclamations people make and how those line up against what we see in the world.
We attended M³AAWG, which is always a wonderful opportunity for us to catch up with smart people and look at the larger email ecosystem and how important our work on messaging infrastructure and policy really is. I was glad to see the 2017 Mary Litynski Award go to Mick Moran of Interpol for his tireless work fighting abuse and the exploitation of children online. I also wrote about how people keep wanting to quote ISP representatives on policy issues, and the origin of “Barry” as ISP spokesperson (we should really add “Betty” too…)
Steve took a turn as our guest columnist for “Ask Laura” this month with a terrific post on why ESPs need so many IP addresses. As always, we’d love to get more questions on all things email — please get in touch!

January 2017: The Month in Email

Between client work and our national political climate, it’s been a very busy month around here and blogging has been light. Things show no sign of slowing down in February, so we’d love to hear from you with questions and suggestions of what you’d most like to see us focus on in our limited blogging time this month. We got a great question about how senders can access their Google Postmaster tools, and I wrote up a guide that you might find useful.

We’re also revisiting some older posts on often-requested topics, such as spamtraps, so feel free to comment below if there are topics you’d like us to address or update. One topic that comes up frequently, both on the blog and in our consulting practice, is about what to do when you’re on a blocklist. I revisited an old-but-still-relevant post on that topic as well.
On the Best Practices front, I wrote about how brands can use multiple channels to connect with customers and prospective customers to promote and enhance email delivery. I also took a moment to look back over 2016 and forward to 2017 in the realm of email security.
I continue to be annoyed by B2B spam, and have started responding to those “requests” for my time directly. Steve also wrote a long post about B2B spam, focusing on how these spammers are using Google and Amazon to try to work around reputation issues.
In case you missed it, I contributed some thoughts to a discussion on 2017 email trends over at Freshmail with my exhortation to “Make 2017 the year you turn deliverability into a KPI.”
I’m also still in the process of completing my 2017 speaking schedule, so I’m looking for any can’t-miss conferences and events you’d recommend. Thanks for keeping in touch!

December 2016: The Month in Email

Happy New Year! We’re looking forward to some interesting new projects this year, both for our clients and for Word to the Wise. Stay tuned!
December was a slow month for blogging, with everything going on. But we’re back on the horse now and ready to blog for 2017.

List and subscription management continue to be hot topics, especially in the wake of the listbombing attacks earlier this year. Earlier this month, I presented a webinar on listbombing for the EEC and DMA to review the attacks and discuss best practices for companies to manage subscriptions. For Ask Laura, I wrote about the unsubscribe process and how senders can best manage those requests to keep their lists current and compliant.
With all the holiday mail flying around, Steve wrote up a good post about the challenges of DNS hosting and issues customers may have reaching your site. He also wrote about canonicalization, a process for comparing things to see if they are the same, which is useful for understanding how messages change during the delivery process. It’s important to understand how this works with DKIM, as that process specifically looks at changes to messages in delivery to validate them.
I wrote a post about how delivery at Gmail is a bit different from other mail providers, which can lead to intermittent delivery problems, and got some useful information in the comments about some upcoming process changes. And as always, unwanted email is SPAM. It doesn’t matter if you call it outreach or prospecting, or “here’s something you might find interesting!” Still SPAM.

November 2016: The Month In Email

Happy December! Between #blackfriday, #cybermonday & #givingtuesday, pretty much everyone in the US has just survived a week of email from every brand and organization they’ve ever interacted with. Phew.

Is this still the best strategy for most senders? Maybe. But it’s always important to be adaptable and continue to evaluate and evolve your strategy as you move through the year.
As always, I continue to think about evolving our own strategies, and how we might best support senders and ESPs. One of the challenges we face when we talk to senders with deliverability questions is that so many of our answers fall into a nebulous “it depends” zone. We’re trying to articulate new ways to explain that to people, and to help them understand that the choices and details they specify at each point of their strategic planning and tactical execution have ramifications on their delivery. While “it depends” is still a correct answer, I’m going to try to avoid it going forward, and instead focus on exploring those choices and details with senders to help them improve deliverability.
In our community of deliverability and anti-abuse professionals, we are — as you’d expect — quite sensitive to unsolicited email that targets our industry. When an email circulates, even what seems like a reasonably well-thought-out email, it occasionally does not land well. Worse still are the various email-related product and service providers who try to legitimize B2B sales messaging as if it is something other than spam.
The takeaway from these discussions for senders is, as always: know your audience. This post about research from Litmus on millennials and spam is a great example of the kinds of things you might consider as you get to know your audience and how they prefer to communicate.
We also had a presidential election this month, one that made much of issues related to email, and it will be interesting to see how the candidates and parties use the email data they collected going forward.
In industry and security news, we saw over a million Google accounts breached by Android malware. We also saw some of the ramifications of a wildcard DNS entry from a domain name expiration — it’s an interesting “how things work” post if you’re curious. In other “how things work” news, we noted some of the recent changes AOL made to its FBL.
I answered an Ask Laura question about dedicated IP pools, and I have a few more queued up as well. As always, we want to know what questions are on the minds of our readers, so please feel free to send them over!

October 2016: The Month in Email

We’ve returned from London, where I spoke at the Email Innovations Summit and enjoyed a bit of vacation. My wrap-up post also mentions an article I wrote for the Only Influencers site, which looks at questions I get asked frequently: “Why does spam make it to the inbox and our legitimate marketing email doesn’t? Should we just copy their tactics?”

In industry news, Yahoo caught our attention for two surprising moves: disabling forwarding and — much more disturbing — creating software for intelligence agencies to search customer email.
Some legal updates this month: The Second Court of Appeals upheld an earlier ruling that companies are in fact liable for the activities of their affiliates, including spam and fraudulent claims. This is important, as we often see spammers and cybercriminals use affiliates to distance themselves from these activities. We also saw another fine assessed for a violation of CASL, and noted with appreciation the transparency and thoughtful process that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) demonstrates in explaining their actions.
Another excellent report is the one created by the Exploratorium to explain their recent experience with being phished. It’s a good piece to share with your organization, in that it reminds us that these cybercriminals are exploiting not just our technology but our trust-based connections to our friends and colleagues. It’s important to raise awareness about social engineering as a part of information security. And speaking of email security, we were delighted to note that André Leduc received the 2016 J.D. Falk award this month at M³AAWG for his excellent work on this topic. It’s a fitting legacy to our friend, J.D., who died five years ago this month. We miss him.
Finally, we’d be remiss in observing Halloween without a post about zombies. Feel free to read it aloud in your spookiest voice.

August 2016: The Month in Email

August was a busy month for both Word to the Wise and the larger world of email infrastructure.

A significant subscription attack targeted .gov addresses, ESPs and over a hundred other industry targets. I wrote about it as it began, and Spamhaus chief executive Steve Linford weighed in in our comments thread. As it continued, we worked with M³AAWG and other industry leaders to share data and coordinate efforts to help senders recover from the attack.
In the aftermath, we wrote several posts about abuse, blocklists, how the industry handles these attacks currently, and how we might address these issues going forward. And obviously this has been on my mind before this attack — I posted about ongoing problems with internet security, how open subscription forms contribute to the problem, and other ways that companies inadvertently support phishing operations.
I posted about the history of email, and recounted some of my earliest experiences, when I had a .bitnet and a .gov address. Did you use email before SMTP? Before email clients? I’d be curious to hear your stories.
Speaking of email clients, I did two posts about how mail gets displayed to the end user: Gmail is displaying authentication results, which should provide end users with a bit more transparency about how authentication is used to deliver or block messages, and Microsoft is partnering with Litmus to improve some of the display issues people face using Outlook. These are both notable — if this is not your first time reading this blog, you know about my constant refrain that delivery is a function of sending people mail they want to engage with. If the mail is properly formatted and displayed, and people have a high degree of confidence that it’s been sent from someone they want to get mail from, that goes a long way towards improving engagement in the channel.
On that note, I spoke at length with Derek Harding about how marketers might change their thinking on deliverability, and he wrote that up for ClickZ. I also participated in the creation of Adobe’s excellent Teaching the Email Marketer How to Fish document (no, not phish…).
Steve was very busy behind the scenes this month thinking about abuse-related topics in light of the SBL issues, but he wrote up a quick post about the Traffic Light Protocol, which is used to denote sensitive information as it is shared.
Finally, for my Ask Laura column this month, I answered questions about delivery and engagement metrics and about permissions with purchased lists. As always, if you have a general question about email delivery, send it along and I’ll consider it for the column.

July 2016: The Month in Email

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. Check out the post for more on mailing social media contacts.
Even people who are collecting addresses responsibly can face challenges. One of the most important challenges to address is paying attention to your existing subscription processes, testing them regularly, evaluating effectiveness and optimizing as needed.
Our most commented-upon post this month was a pointer to a smart writeup about Hillary Clinton’s email server issues. Commenters were pretty evenly split between those who agreed that they see this kind of workaround frequently, and those who felt like regulatory processes do a good job managing against this kind of “shadow IT” behavior. I wrote a followup post on why we see this kind of workaround frequently in email environments, even in regulated industries, and some trends we’re seeing as things improve.
In other election-related email news, we saw the challenges of campaign email being flagged as spam. As I pointed out, this happens to all campaigns, and is nothing unique to the Trump campaign. Still, there are important lessons for marketers here, too, in terms of list management, email content, frequency, and engagement — all of which are inextricably linked to deliverability.
Speaking of spam and engagement, Steve took a look at some clickthrough tracking revealed through a recent spam message I received — and why legitimate marketers should avoid using these sorts of URL referrers.
On the topic of authentication, I wrote a quick post about how seeing ?all in the SPF record tells me one thing: the person managing the record isn’t doing things properly. Need a refresher on authentication? Our most-read blog post of all time can help you out.
And as always, send me your interesting questions and I’ll be happy to consider them as I resume my Ask Laura column in August.

June 2016: The Month in Email

We’re officially halfway through 2016, and looking forward to a slightly less hectic month around here. I hope you’re enjoying your summer (or winter, for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere).

April 2016: The Month in Email

We are finishing up another busy month at WttW. April was a little nutty with network glitches, server crashes, cat woes, and other disruptions, but hopefully that’s all behind us as we head into May. I’ll be very busy in May as well, speaking at Salesforce Connections in Atlanta and the Email Innovation Summit in Las Vegas. Please come say hello if you’re attending either of these great events.

Speaking of great events, I participated in two panels at EEC16 last month. We had a lot of great audience participation, and I met many wonderful colleagues. I wrote up some more thoughts about the conference here. I also had a nice conversation with the folks over at Podbox, and they’ve posted my interview on their site.
In the Podbox interview, as always, I talked about sending mail people want to receive. It always makes me roll my eyes a bit when I see articles with titles like “5 Simple Ways to Reach the Inbox”, so I wrote a bit about that here. In addition to sending mail people want to receive, senders need to make sure they are collecting addresses and building lists in thoughtful and sustainable ways. For more on this topic, check out my post on list brokers and purchased lists.
These same not-so-simple tricks came up again in my discussion of Gmail filters. Everyone wants a magic formula to reach the inbox, and — sorry to burst your bubble — there isn’t ever going to be one. And this is for a good reason: a healthy filter ecosystem helps protect all of us from malicious senders and criminal activity. The email channel is particularly vulnerable to fraud and theft. The constant evolution of filters is one way mail providers can help protect both senders and recipients — but it can be challenging for senders and systems administrators to keep up with this constant evolution. For example, companies sometimes even inadvertently filter their own mail!
I also wrote a bit about how B2B spam is different from B2C spam, and how marketers can better comply with CAN SPAM guidelines in order to reach the inbox. We also republished our much-missed friend and colleague J.D. Falk’s DKIM Primer, which is extremely useful information that was at a no-longer-active link.
One of my favorite posts this month was about “dueling data”, and how to interpret seemingly different findings around email engagement. We also got some good questions for my “Ask Laura” column, where we cover general topics on email delivery. This month we looked at “no auth/no entry” and the Microsoft Smartscreen filter, both of which are useful things to understand for optimizing delivery.
Finally, we are pleased to announce that we’ve joined the i2Coalition, an organization of internet infrastructure providers. They posted a nice introduction on their blog, and we look forward to working with them to help advocate and protect these important technical infrastructures.

March 2016: The Month In Email

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 Steve offered some advice for ESPs and software developers on methods for handling this gracefully. I also answered an Ask Laura question about making the decision to publish DMARC. Look for more on that in this month’s Ask Laura questions…
Our other Ask Laura question this month was about changing ESPs, which senders do for many reasons. It’s useful to know that there will generally be some shifts in deliverability with any move. Different ESPs measure engagement in different ways, and other issues may arise in the transition, so it’s good to be aware of these if you’re contemplating a change.
In industry news, I wrote a sort of meta-post about how the Internet is hard (related: where do you stand on the great Internet vs. internet debate? Comment below!) and we saw several examples of that this month, including a privacy debacle at Florida State University. Marketing is hard, too. I revisited an old post about a fraud case where a woman sued Toyota over an email marketing “prank”. As always, my best practices recommendation for these sorts of things (and everything else!) really boils down to one thing: send wanted email.
Steve wrote extensively about SPF this month in two must-read posts, where he explained the SPF rule of ten and how to optimize your SPF records. He also wrote about Mutt, the much-loved command line email client, and marked the passing of industry pioneer Ray Tomlinson, who, in addition to his many accomplishments, was by all accounts a very thoughtful and generous man.
Finally, I occasionally like to take a moment and follow the twisty paths that lead to my spam folder. Here’s a look at how Ugg spams my email doppelganger, MRS LAURA CORBISHLEY. In other spam news, there’s a lot of very interesting data in the recent 10 Worst list from Spamhaus. Take a look if you haven’t seen it yet.

February 2016: The Month in Email

Happy March! Here’s a look back at our last month of email adventures.
It was a busy few weeks for us with the M³AAWG meeting in San Francisco. We saw lots of old friends and met many new people — all in all, a success, despite the M³AAWG plague we both contracted. Hot topics at the conference included DMARC, of course, and I took the opportunity to write up a guide to help you determine if you should publish a DMARC policy.
On the subject of advice and guidance, Ask Laura continues to be a popular column — we’ve had lots of interesting questions, and are always looking for more general questions about email delivery. We can’t tackle specifics about your program in this column (get in touch if we can help you with that directly) but we can help with questions like “Will our ESP kick us off for mailing purchasers?” or “Help! I’m confused about authentication.”
Continuing on the authentication front, I noted that Gmail is starting to roll out some UI to indicate authentication status to users. It will be interesting to see if that starts to affect user (or sender) behavior in any way. In other interesting industry news, Microsoft has implemented an Office 365 IP Delisting page. I also wrote a followup post to my 2015 overview of the state of ESPs and purchased lists — it’s worth checking out if this is something your business considers.
I wrote a post about security and backdoors, prompted by both the FBI/Apple controversy and by Kim Zetter’s talk at M³AAWG about Stuxnet. These questions about control and access will only get more complicated as we produce, consume, store, and share more data across more devices.
Speaking of predictions, I also noted my contribution to a great whitepaper from Litmus that explores the state of Email Marketing in 2020.
As always, we looked at some best practices this month. I wrote up some of my thoughts about data hygiene following Mailchimp’s blog post about the value of inactive subscribers. As always, there isn’t one right answer, but there’s a lot of good food for thought. And more food for thought: how best practices are a lot like public health recommendations. As with everything, it comes down to knowing your audience(s) and looking at the relationship(s), which, as you know, is a favorite subject around here.

January 2016: The Month in Email

Happy 2016! We started off the year with a few different “predictions” posts. As always, I don’t expect to be right about everything, but it’s a useful exercise for us to look forward and think about where things are headed.
I joined nine other email experts for a Sparkpost webinar on 2016 predictions, which was a lot of fun (see my wrap up post here), and then I wrote a long post about security and authentication, which I think will be THE major topic in email this year both in policy and in practice (see my post about an exploit involving Trend Micro and another about hijacked Verizon addresses). Expect to hear more about this 2016 continues.
My other exciting January project was the launch of my “Ask Laura” column, which I hope will prove a great resource for people with questions about email. Please let me know if you have any questions you’d like to see me answer for your company or your clients — I’ll obscure any identifying information and generalize the answers to be most widely applicable for our readers.
In other industry news, it’s worth noting that Germany has ruled it illegal to harvest users’ address books (as Facebook and other services do). Why does that make sense? Because we’re seeing more and more phishing and scams that rely on social engineering.
In best practices, I wrote about triggered and transactional emails, how they differ, and what to consider when implementing them as part of your email program. Steve describes an easy-to-implement best practice that marketers often ignore: craft your mails so the most important information is shown as text.
I re-published an older post about SMTP rules that has a configuration checklist you might find useful as you troubleshoot any issues. And a newer issue you might be seeing is port25 blocking, which is important if you are hosting your own email senders or using SMTP to send to your ESP.
Finally, I put together some thoughts about reporting abuse. We work closely with high-volume abuse desks who use our Abacus software, and we know that it’s often not worth the time for an individual to report an incident – but I still think it’s worthwhile to have the infrastructure in place, and I wrote about why that is.

December 2015: The month in email

Happy 2016! We enjoyed a bit of a break over the holidays and hope you did too. Here’s our December wrap up – look for a year-end post later this week, as well as our predictions for the year ahead. I got a bit of a head start on those predictions in my post at the beginning of December on email security and other important issues that I think will dominate the email landscape in 2016.
DMARC will continue to be a big story in 2016, and we’re starting to see more emphasis on DMARC alignment as a significant component of delivery decisions. I wrote a bit more on delivery decisions and delivery improvement here.
December in the world of email is all about the holidays, and this year was no exception. We saw the usual mix of retailers creating thoughtful experiences (a nice unsubscribe workflow) and demonstrating not-so-great practices (purchased list fails). We took a deeper look at the impacts and hidden costs of list purchasing – as much as companies want to expand their reach, purchased lists rarely offer real ROI. And on the unsubscribe front, if you missed our discussion and update on unroll.me unsubs, you may want to take a look.
Steve wrote a detailed post looking at what happens when you click on a link, and how you can investigate the path of a clickthrough in a message, which is useful when you’re trying to prevent phishing, fraud, and other spam. In other malicious email news, the CRTC served its first ever warrant as part of an international botnet takedown.
In other industry news, some new information for both ESPs and recipients interested in feedback loops and a somewhat humorous look at the hot-button issues that divide our ranks in the world of email marketing. Please share any we may have missed, or any other topics you’d like us to address.

November 2015: The month in email

As we head into the last month of the year, we look back at our November adventures. I spoke twice this month, first at Message Systems Insight in Monterey (my wrap-up post is here) and then with Ken Magill at the at the 2015 All About eMail Virtual Conference & Expo (a short follow-up here, and a longer post on filters that came out of that discussion here.). Both were fun and engaging — it’s always great to get a direct sense of what challenges are hitting people in the email world, and to help clear up myths and misconceptions about what works and doesn’t work in email marketing and delivery. I’m putting together my conference and speaking schedule for 2016 — if you know of anything interesting that should be on my radar, please add it in the comments, thanks!
In industry news, we noted a sharp uptick in CBL listings, and then posted about the explanation for the false positives. Steve wrote about an interesting new Certificate Authority (CA) called Let’s Encrypt, which looks to be a wonderful (and much-needed) alternative for certificates, and I put together some thoughts on SenderScore.
Steve and I did a few posts in parallel this month. First, Steve posted an interesting exercise in SPF debugging. Are you seeing mail from legitimate senders flagged as spam? This might be why. My investigative post was about ISP rejections, and how you can figure out where the block is occurring. In each case, you’ll get a glimpse of how we go about identifying and troubleshooting issues, even when we don’t have much to go on.
We each also wrote a bit about phishing. Steve posted a timely warning about spear phishing — malware attacks disguised as legitimate email from within your organization — and reminds all of us to be careful about attachments. With all of the more secure options for document sharing these days, it’s a lot easier to avoid the risk by maintaining a no-attachments policy in your company. And I wrote about how the Department of Defense breaking HTML links in email to help combat phishing. If your lists include military addresses (.mil), you may want to come up with a strategy for marketing to those recipients that relies less on a clickthrough call to action.
We amused ourselves a bit with a game of Deliverability Bingo, then followed up with a more serious look at the thing we hear all the time — “I’m sure they’ll unblock me if I can just explain my business model.” While an ESP abuse desk is unlikely to be swayed by this strategy, it is actually at the core of how we think about deliverability at Word to the Wise. Legitimate senders have many kinds of lists, many kinds of recipients, many kinds of marketing strategies, and many kinds of business goals. For us to help marketers craft sustainable email programs, we need to understand exactly what matters most to our clients.

October 2015: The month in email

When you spend most of your day working on email and spam issues, it starts to cross into all aspects of your life. In October, I was amused by authors who find names in spam, SMTP-related t-shirts on camping trips, and spam that makes you laugh. Maybe I need a vacation?
We were quite busy with conference presentations and client work this month, but took time to note the things that captured our attention, as always. We highlighted a few things we enjoyed reading around the web: Brian Krebs’ Reddit AMA, the results of Jan Schaumann’s survey on ethics in internet operations, and a great post on Usenet from Joe St. Sauver.
In industry news, we covered a few glitches that are worth noting, in case you missed them: Yahoo FBL confirmation emails, Google postmaster tools, Network Solutions email, and weird Lashback listings. Even though these have mostly been resolved, it’s useful to keep track of the types and frequency of these sorts of issues, as they can significantly impact your deliverability and may be useful as your clients or business stakeholders raise questions about campaign performance.
Steve contributed a few key technical posts this month, including a short post on IPv6 authentication issues, following up on the issues he outlined back in July. He also noted Gmail’s upcoming move to DMARC p=reject, which is notable for the ways they are are looking to mitigate risks with their ARC proposal. Finally, he wrote that it’s worth looking at false positives every now and then, as it can reveal interesting patterns in the ESP landscape.
Finally, a good suggestion from the best practices file: engagement through confirming user names, and a not-so-good plan for an app that’s sure to invite abuse and harassment.

September 2015: The month in email

September’s big adventure was our trip to Stockholm, where I gave the keynote address at the APSIS Conference (Look for a wrapup post with beautiful photos of palaces soon!) and had lots of interesting conversations about all things email-related.
Now that we’re back, we’re working with clients as they prepare for the holiday mailing season. We wrote a post on why it’s so important to make sure you’ve optimized your deliverability strategy and resolved any open issues well in advance of your sends. Steve covered some similar territory in his post “Outrunning the Bear”. If you haven’t started planning, start now. If you need some help, give us a call.
In that post, we talked a bit about the increased volumes of both marketing and transactional email during the holiday season, and I did a followup post this week about how transactional email is defined — or not — both by practice and by law. I also wrote a bit about reputation and once again emphasized that sending mail people actually want is really the only strategy that can work in the long term.
While we were gone, I got a lot of spam, including a depressing amount of what I call “legitimate spam” — not just porn and pharmaceuticals, but legitimate companies with appalling address acquisition and sending strategies. I also wrote about spamtraps again (bookmark this post if you need more information on spamtraps, as I linked to several previous discussions we’ve had on the subject) and how we need to start viewing them as symptoms of larger list problems, not something that, once eradicated, means a list is healthy. I also posted about Jan Schaumann’s survey on internet operations, and how this relates to the larger discussions we’ve had on the power of systems administrators to manage mail (see Meri’s excellent post here<).
I wrote about privacy and tracking online and how it’s shifted over the past two decades. With marketers collecting and tracking more and more data, including personally-identifiable information (PII), the risks of organizational doxxing are significant. Moreso than ever before, marketers need to be aware of security issues. On the topic of security and cybercrime, Steve posted about two factor authentication, and how companies might consider providing incentives for customers to adopt this model.

August 2015: The month in review

It’s been a busy blogging month and we’ve all written about challenges and best practices. I found myself advocating that any company that does email marketing really must have a well-defined delivery strategy. Email is such vital part of how most companies communicate with customers and potential customers, and the delivery landscape continues to increase in complexity (see my post on pattern matching for a more abstract look at how people tend to think about filters and getting to the inbox). Successful email marketers are proactive about delivery strategy and are able to respond quickly as issues arise. Stay tuned for more from us on this topic.
I also wrote up some deliverability advice for the DNC, which I think is valuable for anyone looking at how to maintain engagement with a list over time. It’s also worth thinking about in the context of how to re-engage a list that may have been stagnant for a while. A comment on that post inspired a followup discussion about how delivery decisions get made, and whether an individual person in the process could impact something like an election through these delivery decisions. What do you think?
As we frequently point out, “best practices” in delivery evolve over time, and all too often, companies set up mail programs and never go back to check that things continue to run properly. We talked about how to check your tech, as well as what to monitor during and after a send. Josh wrote about utilizing all of your data across multiple mail streams, which is critical for understanding how you’re engaging with your recipients, as well as the importance of continuous testing to see what content and presentation strategies work best for those recipients.
Speaking of recipients, we wrote a bit about online identity and the implications of unverified email addresses in regards to the Ashley Madison hack and cautioned about false data and what might result from the release of that data.
Steve’s in-depth technical series for August was a two-part look at TXT records — what they are and how to use them — and he explains that the ways people use these, properly and improperly, can have a real impact on your sends.
In spam news, the self-proclaimed Spam King Sanford Wallace is still spamming, despite numerous judgments against him and his most recent guilty plea this month. For anyone else still confused about spam, the FTC answered some questions on the topic. It’s a good intro or refresher to share with colleagues. We also wrote about the impact of botnets on the inbox (TL;DR version: not much. The bulk of the problem for end users continues to be people making poor marketing decisions.) In other fraud news, we wrote about a significant spearphishing case and how DMARC may or may not help companies protect themselves.

July 2015: The Month in Email

Once again, we reviewed some of the ways brands are trying (or might try) to improve engagement with customers. LinkedIn, who frequently top lists of unwanted-but-legitimate email, announced that they’ll be sending less mail. Josh wrote about giving subscribers options for both the type and frequency of messages, and about setting expectations for new subscribers. In each case, it’s about respecting that customers really want to engage with brands in the email channel, but don’t want the permission they’ve granted to be abused. I also wrote a brief post following up on our June discussion on purchased lists, and as you’d predict, I continue to discourage companies from mailing to these recipients.

June 2015: the Month in Email

Happy July! We are back from another wonderful M3AAWG conference and enjoyed seeing many of you in Dublin. It’s always so great for us to connect with our friends, colleagues, and readers in person. I took a few notes on Michel van Eeten’s keynote on botnets, and congratulated our friend Rodney Joffe on winning the prestigious Mary Litynski Award.
In anti-spam news, June brought announcements of three ISP-initiated CAN-SPAM cases, as well as a significant fine leveled by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) against Porter Airlines. In other legal news, a UK case against Spamhaus has been settled, which continues the precedent we’ve observed that documenting a company’s practice of sending unsolicited email does not constitute libel.
In industry news, AOL started using Sender Score Certification, and Yahoo announced (and then implemented) a change to how they handle their Complaint Feedback Loop (CFL). Anyone have anything to report on how that’s working? We also noted that Google has discontinued the Google Apps for ISPs program, so we expect we might see some migration challenges along the way. I wrote a bit about some trends I’m seeing in how email programs are starting to use filtering technologies for email organization as well as fighting spam.
Steve, Josh and I all contributed some “best practices” posts this month on both technical issues and program management issues. Steve reminded us that what might seem like a universal celebration might not be a happy time for everyone, and marketers should consider more thoughtful strategies to respect that. I wrote a bit about privacy protection (and pointed to Al Iverson’s post on the topic), and Josh wrote about when senders should include a physical address, what PTR (or Reverse DNS) records are and how to use them, testing your opt-out process (do it regularly!), and advice on how to use images when many recipients view email with images blocked.

May 2015: The Month in Email

Greetings from Dublin, where we’re gearing up for M3AAWG adventures.
In the blog this month, we did a post on purchased lists that got a lot of attention. If you’ve been reading the blog for any length of time, you know how I feel about purchased lists — they perform poorly and cause delivery problems, and we always advise clients to steer clear. With your help, we’ve now compiled a list of the ESPs that have a clearly stated policy that they will not tolerate purchased lists. This should be valuable ammunition both for ESPs and for email program managers when they asked to use purchased lists. Let us know if we’re missing any ESPs by commenting directly on that post. We also shared an example of what we saw when we worked with a client using a list that had been collected by a third party.
In other best practices around addresses, we discussed all the problems that arise when people use what they think are fake addresses to fill out web forms, and gave a nod to a marketer trying an alternate contact method to let customers know their email is bouncing.
We also shared some of the things we advise our clients to do when they are setting up a mailing or optimizing an existing program. You might consider trying them before your own next send. In the “what not to do” category, we highlighted four things that spammers do that set them apart from legitimate senders.
In industry news, we talked about mergers, acquisitions and the resulting business changes: Verizon is buying AOL, Aurea is buying Lyris, Microsoft will converge Office365/EOP and Outlook.com/Hotmail, and Sprint will no longer support clear.net and clearwire.net addresses.
Josh posted about Yahoo’s updated deliverability FAQ, which is interesting reading if you’re keeping up on deliverability and ESP best practices. He also wrote about a new development in the land of DMARC: BestGuessPass. Josh also wrote a really useful post about the differences between the Mail From and the Display From addresses, which is a handy reference if you ever need to explain it to someone.
And finally, I contributed a few “meta” posts this month that you might enjoy:

April 2015: The Month in Email

We started the month with some conversations about best practices, both generally looking at the sort of best practices people follow (or don’t) as well as some specific practices we wanted to look at in more depth. Three for this month:

March 2015: The month in email

Happy March! We started the month with some more movement around CASL enforcement from our spam-fighting friends to the north. We noted a $1.1 million fine levied against Compu-Finder for CASL violations, as well as a $48,000 fine to Plentyoffish Media for failing to provide unsubscribe links. We noted a few interesting things: the fines are not being imposed at the maximum limits, violations are not just on B2C marketing, but also on B2B senders, and finally, that it really just makes sense — both from a delivery perspective and a financial perspective — to comply with the very reasonable best practices outlined in CASL.

February 2015 – The month in email

This was a short and busy month at WttW!

We attended another great M3AAWG conference, and had our usual share of interesting discussions, networking, and cocktails. I recapped our adventures here, and shared a photo of the people who keep your email safe while wearing kilts as well. We also commended Jayne Hitchcock on winning the Mary Litynski award for her work fighting abuse and cyberstalking.

January 2015 – The Month in Email

It’s February already! January went fast, right? At WttW, we are gearing up for MAAWG SF later this month — will we see you there?
We started the year with a set of predictions about email. Mostly we think email will continue to be great at some things and not-so-great at other things, and we’ll keep fighting the good fight to make it better.
As always, I’m interested in filters and how spammers continue to work around them to reach the inbox. I also wrote about how the language of an email impacts delivery, and wrote an expanded response to a comment suggesting email filters should be illegal. You can guess where I stand on that (and if you can’t, perhaps you might read more about how email is an inherently malicious traffic stream…)
I also took a moment to point out a trend I’m really enjoying, which is the rise of content marketing (a.k.a. giving customers useful and interesting information they can’t find elsewhere). As I said in the post, I’ll be curious to see how ROI plays out with this strategy.
We also talked about some of the less exciting content we see in email, notably the infamous Murkowski Statement, by which a spammer declares “Nope! Nothing to see over here!”
Steve also pointed out some content shenanigans in the form of hidden preview text, with some additional clarification from the original marketer in the comments.
In industry news, the big story was that Microsoft has partially implemented DMARC for Office365, and was the first to make a public statement about the specific ways they’ve chosen to implement. In my post, I did a walkthrough of a message to illustrate a bit about how this works, which might be useful if you’re trying to wrap your head around DMARC implementations.
We also talked about consolidation in the ESP space, and got a number of comments from readers about who they think might be next. Shortly thereafter, Listcast was acquired by MailerMailer.
Josh noted a few major shutdowns: Yahoo China email services and the AHBL list. The latter explores the challenges inherent in decommissioning a blacklist, and there’s a good discussion in the comments, so you might check it out if you missed that earlier this month.
Josh also pointed to the Salesforce State of Marketing report, which is always a useful set of metrics about how marketers are using email and other channels. It’s definitely worth a read.

December 2014: The month in email

2014 has been a busy and exciting year at Word to the Wise (look for more on that in a year-end wrap-up post next week!) and this month was particularly thrilling for us as we officially doubled our size with the addition of Josh and Meri on our client services team.
If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you’ve probably spotted Josh’s byline on a few posts: Google’s Inbox Team answers questions on Reddit, which looks at what this new email client portends for both consumers and email marketers, and M3AAWG Recommends TLS, which reviews M3AAWG’s recommendation that mailbox providers phase out SSL encryption in favor of TLS. Look for more smart insights from Josh in 2015.
Steve contributed a post on the proper syntax for displaying a friendly email address, and a very helpful guide for generating useful test data that doesn’t compromise personally identifiable information from your actual customer data. He also detailed the brief DBL false positive from Spamhaus’ new “Abused-Legit” sub-zone and best practices for handling unrecognized responses.
I wrote about some of the subtleties inherent in how brands decide to “converse” with customers in email and other channels. We’ll just keep saying it: companies need to respect the inbox as personal space. I want to thank both Steve and Josh for picking up my slack on blogging. 7+ years is a long time to try and say new things on the blog and I needed a bit of a break.

November 2014 – the month in email

Over the years, we get many of the same questions again and again. This isn’t a complaint; it’s a useful opportunity for us to check in and see if the technologies, policies and best practices have evolved over time, or if our previous recommendations still stand. One example this month of something that has changed (the situation has improved a bit): Using URL shorteners and one that has not: The Best Time to Send Email.

October 2014 – The Month in Email

October was action-packed at WttW. We wrapped up some big and interesting client projects (look for some case studies soon!), attended another great M³AAWG conference, and made an exciting announcement that we’re hiring a deliverability specialist. The combination of these frees up some more of my time for blogging, which I’ve really missed. Look for more from me in November and December.

September 2014: The Month in Email

September was another busy month for us, but Steve stepped up and wrote a number of really interesting posts on email history, cryptography, and current technical issues in the email landscape.
We started the month with a look at the various RFCs that served as the technical specifications for developing message transfer protocols in the 1970s. It’s really fascinating to look at the evolution of these tools we use every day 40 years later. We followed up with a second post on the origins of network email, which is a great primer (or refresher) on the early days of email.
Steve’s four-part series on cryptography and email started with an in-depth look at how the industry is evolving with respect to encryption and privacy issues. He then introduced us to Alice and Bob (or reintroduced those of us who have been following the adventures of the first couple of cryptography), and described symmetric-key and public-key encryption. His next post described message signing, and how DKIM is used to manage this. He finished up the series with a post on PGP keys.
In industry news: Spamcop is shutting down its email service. There shouldn’t be any major impact on senders, but the post has some specific notes on DMARC implications. We also noted an interesting mail routing suggestion on Twitter, and wrote a post on using Mail.app for this.
In other DMARC news, we wrote about DMARC and report size limits, which might be useful information, depending on your configuration. We also launched a new DMARC tool to help senders understand who is publishing DMARC. Let us know what you think and if you’re finding it useful.
We couldn’t let a month go by without mentioning filters. We looked at a sector we don’t usually discuss, corporate filtering, and went in-depth on a much-misunderstood topic, content filtering.
Finally, Laura offered a webinar on a favorite topic, deliverability, in conjunction with the AMA and Message Systems. If you missed it, you can watch the recorded version here, or just take a peek at some of the reaction via Twitter.

August 2014: The Month in Email

Isn’t August the month where things are supposed to slow down? We’re still waiting for that to happen around here… it’s been great to be busy, but we’re hoping to continue to carve out more time for blogging as we move into the fall.
August
As usual, we reported on a mix of industry trends and news, the persistence of spam, and did a deep dive into an interesting technical topic. Let’s start there: Steve wrote a post explaining Asynchronous Bounces (yes, it’s a GNFAB), with some examples of how they’re used and how they can cause operational problems.
In industry news, we did a roundup post of some Gmail changes and a followup post on security issues with non-Latin characters in addresses. We also celebrated the long-awaited release of a wonderful resource from MAAWG that I am very proud to have helped author, the white paper Help! I’m on a Blocklist! (PDF link). We receive dozens of these calls every week, and though we are always happy to help people solve urgent delivery crises, we spend most of our consulting time and attention working with people to build sustainable email programs, so this document is a great “self-service” resource for people looking to troubleshoot blocklist issues on their own.
In other industry and MAAWG-related news, we noted that the nomination period for the J.D. Falk award has opened (you have just a few more days, procrastinators) and took a moment to reminisce about our friend J.D. and his incredible contributions to the field.
On the topic of creating, sending, and reading more attractive email, we posted some resources from Mailchimp and crowdsourcing templates from Send With Us. We also incorrectly reported on a not-actually-new interface from AOL, Alto. Interesting to note that there’s been so little followup from AOL (and almost no post-launch coverage) in the two years since launch.
We also touched on a few myths: email saves trees and low complaint volume is good.
And finally, in November of 2013, I unsubscribed from every possible email I received on a specific account. I followed up on that briefly in a Part 2 post, and this month went back and wrote a Part 3 followup. Spoiler alert: spam is still a problem. Of course, we got some comments that we were probably doing it wrong, so Unsubscribe Barbie showed up to add her thoughts. We try not to be snarky around here, but sometimes we just don’t try very hard.

July 2014: The month in email

We continue to be busy with really interesting client work. Look for some new posts and white papers to come out of this research over the next few months, but for now blogging has been a bit light while we’re working hard. In parallel with our busy times, we have also been pondering the ways in which the email world illustrates the classic bon mot “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, and we’ve been revisiting some posts from a few years ago to examine this.
We started July with a nod to a good subscription experience just as CASL, the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation went into effect on Canada Day. While companies have another 17 months to put these provisions into practice, it’s a good reminder that periodic re-engagement with customers can be very effective in helping you maintain high-quality subscriber lists. We talked a bit more about CASL here and what protections the law intends.
In stark contrast, we posted about an organization that is doing a less-than-stellar job making sure they’re only sending wanted email. The Direct Marketing Association is a terrific resource and member organization for marketers across industries and channels, but their email marketing practices don’t always live up to their mission of “Advancing and Protecting Responsible Data-Driven Marketing”, and we explored some ways in which they might improve this.
Those of you who have been reading this blog for any time at all know that we tend to talk about wanted mail and unwanted mail rather than the more general category of spam. Marketers tend to think their mail can’t possibly be spam if it’s not offering Viagra or phishing for credit card information, but that’s not really the point — if a customer doesn’t want to read your email about new mountain bikes, even if they bought a mountain bike from you three years ago, that’s unwanted email. Here’s a post we revisited about why customers might not want your mail, and a new post about engagement.
One risk of sending unwanted email, of course, is that customers complain, and that will affect your delivery going forward. We revisited a post about feedback loops, and also talked a bit about addressing delivery problems as they come up rather than waiting for them to resolve on their own (mostly, they won’t!)
I also proposed a bit of a thought experiment around monetizing the complaint stream, and followed up with a second post. There are some good points in the comments of those posts, but mostly I think it’s an interesting solution to addressing risk and abuse at ESPs.
Finally, Steve wrote a short post about our new mail servers and how quickly spammers descended as we set those up. It’s a constant battle!

June 2014: The month in email

Each month, we like to focus on a core email feature or function and present an overview for people looking to learn more. This month, we addressed authentication with SPF.
We also talked about feedback mechanisms, and the importance for senders to participate in FBL processes.
In our ongoing discussions about spam filters, we took a look at the state of our own inboxes and lamented the challenge spam we get from Spamarrest. We also pointed out a post from Cloudmark where they reiterate much of what we’ve been saying about filters: there’s no secret sauce, just a continuing series of efforts to make sure recipients get only the mail they want and expect to receive. We also looked at a grey area in the realm of wanted and expected mail: role accounts (such as “marketing@companyname.com”) and how ESPs handle them.
As always, getting into the Gmail inbox is a big priority for our clients and other senders. We talked a bit about this here, and a bit more about the ever-changing world of filters here.
On the subject of list management, we wrote about the state of affiliate mailers and the heightened delivery challenges they face getting in the inbox. We got our usual quota of spam, and a call from a marketer who had purchased our names on a list. You can imagine how effective that was for them.
And in a not-at-all-surprising development, spammers have started to employ DMARC workarounds. We highlighted some of the Yahoo-specific issues in a post that raises more questions.
We also saw some things we quite liked in June. In the Best Practices Hall of Fame, we gave props to this privacy policy change notification and to our bank’s ATM receipts.
We also reviewed some interesting new and updated technology in the commercial MTA space, and were happy to share those findings.

May 2014: The month in email

It’s been a busy and exciting month for us here.
Laura finished a multi-year project with M3AAWG, the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (look for the results to be published later this year) and continued working with clients on interesting delivery challenges and program opportunities. Steve focused on development on the next version release of Abacus, our flagship abuse desk tool, which will also be available later this year.
And as always, we had things to say about email.
The World of Spam and Email Best Practices
We started the month with a bit of a meta-discussion on senders’ fears of being labeled spammers, and reiterated what we always say: sending mail that some people don’t want doesn’t make you evil, but it is an opportunity to revisit your email programs and see if there are opportunities to better align your goals with the needs of people on your email lists. We outlined how we’ve seen people come around to this position after hitting spamtraps. That said, sometimes it is just evil. And it’s still much the same evil it’s been for over a decade.
We also wrote a post about reputation, which is something we get asked about quite frequently. We have more resources on the topic over at the WiseWords section of our site.
Gmail, Gmail, Gmail
Our friends over at Litmus estimate Gmail market share at 12%, which seems pretty consistent with the percentage of blog posts we devote to the topic, yes? We had a discussion of Campaign Monitor’s great Gmail interview, and offered some thoughts on why we continue to encourage clients to focus on engagement and relevance in developing their email programs. We also wrote a post about how Gmail uses filters, which is important for senders to understand as they create campaigns.
SMTP and TLS
Steve wrote extensively this month about the technical aspects of delivery and message security. This “cheat sheet” on SMTP rejections is extremely useful for troubleshooting – bookmark it for the next time you’re scratching your head trying to figure out what went wrong.
He also wrote a detailed explanation of how TLS encryption works with SMTP to protect email in transit, and followed that with additional information on message security throughout the life of the message. This is a great set of posts to explore if you’re thinking about security and want to understand potential vulnerabilities.
DKIM
Steve also wrote a series of posts about working with DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), the specification for signing messages to identify and claim responsibility for messages. He started with a detailed explanation of DKIM Replay Attacks, which happens when valid email is forwarded or otherwise compromised by spammers, phishers or attackers. Though the DKIM signature persists (by design) through a forward, the DKIM specification restricts an attacker’s ability to modify the message itself. Steve’s post describes how senders can optimize their systems to further restrict these attacks. Another way that attackers attempt to get around DKIM restrictions is by injecting additional headers into the message, which can hijack a legitimately signed message. If you’re concerned about these sort of attacks (and we believe you should be), it’s worth learning more about DKIM Key Rotation to help manage this. (Also of note: we have some free DKIM management tools available in the WiseTools section of our site.)
As always, we’re eager to hear from you if there are topics you’d like us to cover in June.

April: The month in email

April was a big month of changes in the email world, and here at Word to the Wise as we launched our new site, blog and logo.
DMARC
The big story this month has been DMARC, which started with a policy change Yahoo made on April 4 updating their DMARC policy from “report” to “reject”. We began our coverage with a brief DMARC primer to explain the basics around these policy statements and why senders are moving in this direction. We shared some example bounces due to Yahoo’s p=reject, and talked about how to fix discussion lists to work with the new Yahoo policy. We gathered some pointers to other articles worth reading on the Yahoo DMARC situation, and suggested some options for dealing with DMARC for mail intermediaries. Yahoo issued a statement about this on April 11th, explaining that it had been highly effective in reducing spoofed email. We also noted a great writeup on the situation from Christine at ReturnPath. On April 22nd, AOL also announced a DMARC p=reject record. We talked a bit about who might be next (Gmail?) and discussed how Comcast chose to implement DMARC policies, using p=reject not for user email, but only for the domains they use to communicate directly with customers. We expect to see more discussion and policy changes over the next few weeks, so stay tuned.
Spamtraps
We wrote three posts in our continuing discussion about spamtraps. The first was in response to a webinar from the DMA and EEC, where we talked about how different kinds of traps are used in different ways, and, again, how spamtraps are just a symptom of a larger problem. Following that, we wrote more about some ongoing debate on traps as we continued to point out that each trap represents a lost opportunity for marketers to connect with customers, which is really where we hope email program managers will focus. And finally, we tried to put some myths about typo traps to rest. As I mentioned in that last post, I feel like I’m repeating myself over and over again, but I want to make sure that people get good information about how these tools are used and misused.
Security
We started the month by saying “Security has to become a bigger priority for companies” and indeed, the internet continued to see security breaches in April, including the very serious Heartbleed vulnerability in SSL. In the email world, AOL experienced a compromise, which contributed to some of the DMARC policy changes we discussed above. In a followup post, we talked about how these breaches appear to be escalating. Again, we expect to hear more about this in the next weeks and months.
Best Practices
Ending on a positive note, we had a few posts about best practices and some email basics. We started with a pointer to Al Iverson’s post on masking whois info and why not to do it. Steve wrote up a comprehensive post with everything you ever wanted to know about the From header and RFC5322. I talked about how companies ignore opt-outs, and why they shouldn’t. I shared a really good example of a third-party email message, and also talked about message volume. And finally, we talked about how and why we warm up IP addresses.
Let us know if there’s anything you’d like to hear more about in May!

March 2014: The month in email

What did we talk about here on the blog in March? It seems we talked a lot about Gmail but also looked at some CAN SPAM issues.
Gmail
When it comes to innovating in the inbox, Gmail is leaps and bounds ahead of the pack. They made some improvements to their image caching process and are now respecting cache headers, so marketers can update images and track multiple opens. They also started rolling out grid view in the promotions tab, giving marketers a way to show pictures to recipients rather than text subject lines. I wrote about their views on senders best practices as presented at M³AAWG 30 in San Francisco. Then there was ongoing news about their new FBL. Many ESPs started getting approval notices for joining their FBL and Sendgrid published an open letter about how the FBL has been helping them identify bad players on their network.
CAN SPAM
Oddly enough I wrote two different posts about CAN SPAM, which seems like a lot for as little as I managed to blog in March. One discussed if CAN SPAM applied to individual prospecting emails (yes, but really, violating that is like speeding most people aren’t going to get caught or punished) and the other looked at the rules surrounding harvesting.
Delivery
I talked about how domains need to be warmed up, not just IP addresses. And how there are lots of common causes for delivery problems, and too many people go for the edge cases without ruling out the normal cases first.
Odds and ends
The other posts don’t really lend themselves to easy classification. I talked delivery on Tech Talk. I amused myself by posting a link to horribly done spam and a bit of a snarky summary of the current state of ISP Relations. I linked to a blog post pointing out that social engineering is still alive and well in the hackers toolkit and another one looking at effective email marketing strategies.

This month in email: February 2014

After a few months of hiatus, I’m resurrecting the this month in email feature. So what did we talk about in February?
Industry News
There was quite a bit of industry news. M³AAWG was in mid-February and there were actually a few sessions we were allowed to blog about. Gmail announced their new pilot FBL program. Ladar Levinson gave the keynote talking about the Lavabit shutdown and his new darkmail program. Brian Krebs won the Mary Litynski award for his work in investigating online security issues. The 4 major mailbox providers talked about their spam filters and spam filtering philosophy.
February was also the month where different companies evaluated their success or failure of products. LinkedIn announced the shutdown of their Intro product and Facebook announced the shutdown of their Facebook.com email service.
Security Issues
Cloudmark published their 2013 report on the Global Spam Threat and we discovered that the massive Target breach started through phishing. I also noticed a serious uptick in the amount of phishing mails in my own mailbox. There is new round of denial of service attacks using NTP amplification. We provided information on how to secure your NTP servers.
Address Collection
The Hip Hop group De La Soul released their entire catalog for free, online, using a confirmed opt-in email process. On the flip side, the M³AAWG hotel required anyone logging into the wifi network to give an email address and agree to receive marketing mail. We also discovered that some political mailing lists were being used in ways the politicians and recipients didn’t expect.
Email Practices
I talked about how to go about contacting an ISP that doesn’t have a postmaster page or a published method of contact. Much of that information is actually relevant for contacting ISPs that do have a contact method, too. Finally, I talked about how ISPs measure engagement and how that’s significantly different from how ESPs think it is.

This month in email: October 2013

What did we talk about in October? Let’s take a look back over this month.