Postmaster

The inbox is a moving target

The more I look at the industry, the more convinced I am that we’re in the middle of a fundamental shift in how email is filtered. This shift will change how we handle email deliverability and what tools we have and what information we can use as senders to address challenges to getting to the inbox.

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.

Google Postmaster Tools: Last Chance!

I’ll be closing down the Google Postmaster Tools survey Oct 31. If you’ve not had a chance to answer the questions yet, you have through tomorrow.
This data will be shared here. The ulterior motive is to convince Google to make an API available soon due to popular demand.

Sharing access to Google Postmaster Tools

As a delivery consultant, I always ask clients to share their Google postmaster reports with me. As Gmail is one of the bigger delivery challenges for a lot of senders, having access to the postmaster tools helps tease out issues. I had some issues earlier this week getting access to tools and so brought up a conversation on one of the delivery lists. The nice folks there helped me get it solved.
A few hours later someone asked me how do I get access and I thought that was a brilliant idea for a blog post today.

Ethics in Internet Operations

In early September, I posted about a survey being done by Jan Schaumann regarding how sysadmins viewed their ethical obligations with regard to users. The results of this have now been published by Jan. He’s also shared his talk and slides on the data.
Well worth a look through the data. I took a quick run through of his talk and it looked interesting and is definitely going on my to-read list.

Do you run spam filters?

Jan Schaumann is putting together a talk on ethics in as related to folks managing internet operations. He has a survey and is looking for folks who wrangle the machines that run the internet. I’m copying his post, with permission, due to a slightly NSFW image on his announcement.

Do system administrators have too much power?

Yesterday, Laura brought a thread from last week to my attention, and the old-school ISP admin and mail geek in me felt the need to jump up and say something in response to Paul’s comment. My text here is all my own, and is based upon personal experience as well as those of my friends. That said, I’m not speaking on their behalf, either. 🙂
I found Paul’s use of the word ‘SysAdmin’ to be a mighty wide (and — in my experience — probably incorrect) brush to be painting with, particularly when referring to operations at ISPs with any significant number of mailboxes. My fundamental opposition to use of the term comes down to this: It’s no longer 1998.
The sort of rogue (or perhaps ‘maverick’) behavior to which you refer absolutely used to be a thing, back when a clean 56k dial-up connection was the stuff of dreams and any ISP that had gone through the trouble to figure out how to get past the 64k user limit in the UNIX password file was considered both large and technically competent. Outside of a few edge cases, I don’t know many system administrators these days who are able to (whether by policy or by access controls) — much less want to — make such unilateral deliverability decisions.
While specialization may be for insects, it’s also inevitable whenever a system grows past a certain point. When I started in the field, there were entire ISPs that were one-man shows (at least on the technical side). This simply doesn’t scale. Eventually, you start breaking things up into departments, then into services, then teams assigned to services, then parts of services assigned to teams, and back up the other side of the mountain, until you end up with a whole department whose job it is to run one component of one service.
For instance, let’s take inbound (just inbound) email. It’s not uncommon for a large ISP to have several technical teams responsible for the processing of mail being sent to their users:

Politics and Delivery

Last week I posted some deliverability advice for the DNC based on their acquisition of President Obama’s 2012 campaign database. Paul asked a question on that post that I think is worth some attention.

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.

Google Postmaster Tools

Earlier this month Google announced a new set of tools for senders at their Postmaster Tools site. To get into the site you need to login to Google, but they also have a handy support page that doesn’t require a login for folks who want to see what the page is about.
We did register, but don’t send enough mail to get any data back from Google. However, the nice folks at SendGrid were kind enough to share their experiences with me and show me what the site looked like with real data, when I spoke at their recent customer meeting.
Who can register?
Anyone can register for Google Postmaster tools. All you need is the domain authenticated by DKIM (the d= value) or by SPF (the Return Path value).
Who can see data?
Google is only sharing data with trusted domains and only if a minimum volume is sent from those domains. They don’t describe what a trusted domain is, but I expect the criteria include a domain with some history (no brand new domains) and a reasonable track record (some or all of the mail is good).
For ESPs who want to monitor all the mail they send, every mail needs to be signed with a common d= domain. Individual customers that want their own d= can do so. These customers can register for their own access to just their mail.
ESPs that want to do this need to sign with the common key first, and then with the customer’s more selective key.
How does it work?
Google collects data from DKIM and/or SPF authenticated mail, aggregates it and presents it to a Google user that has authenticated the domain.
How do I authenticate?

iCloud Postmaster resources

iCloud Mail (mac.com, me.com, icloud.com) has a shiny, new postmaster resources page. No whitelist, no FBL, just a good list of best practices to follow for sending bulk mail.

Contacting an ISP that doesn't have a postmaster page

How do you contact an ISP about a block that doesn’t have a postmaster page? While there’s no one answer, I do have some suggestions.
Start by contacting the postmaster@ or abuse@ addresses. For smaller ISPs, the same people handling outbound abuse are the people handling inbound filtering.
When you contact them have the following:

ISP Relationships

Delivra has a new whitepaper written by Ken Magill talking about the value (or lack thereof) of relationships with ISPs. In Ken’s understated way, he calls baloney on ESPs that claim they have great delivery because they have good relationships with ISPs.
He’s right.
I get a lot of calls from potential clients and some calls from current clients asking me if I can contact an ISP on their behalf and “tell the ISP we’re really not a spammer”. My normal answer is that I can, but that there isn’t a place in the spam filtering process for “sender has hired Laura and she says they’re not a spammer.” I mean, it would be totally awesome if that was the case. But it’s not. It’s even the case where I’m close friends with folks inside the ISPs.
I’m pretty sure I’ve told the story before about being at a party with one of the Hotmail ISP folks. There was a sender that had hired me to deal with some Hotmail issues and I’d been working with Barry H. (name changed, and he’s not at Hotmail any more) to resolve it. During the course of the party, we started talking shop. Barry told me that he was sure that my client was sending opt-in mail, but that his users were not reacting well for it. He also told me there was no way he could override the filters because there wasn’t really a place for him to interfere in the filtering.
Even when folks inside the ISPs were willing and able to help me, they usually wouldn’t do so just because I asked. They might look at a sender on my request, but they wouldn’t adjust filters unless the sender met their standards.
These days? ISPs are cutting their non-income producing departments to the bone, and “sender services” is high up the list of departments to cut. Most of the folks I know have moved on from the ISP to the ESP side. Ken mentions one ISP rep that is now working for a sender. I actually know of 3, and those are just employees from the top few ISPs who are now at fairly major ESPs. I’m sure there are a lot more than that.
The reality is, you can have the best relationships in the world with ISPs, but that won’t get bad mail into the inbox. Filters don’t work that way anymore. That doesn’t mean relationships are useless, though. Having relationships at ISPs can get information that can shorten the process of fixing the issue. If an ISP says “you are blocked because you’re hitting spam traps” then we do data hygiene. If the ISP says “you’re sending mail linking to a blocked website” then we stop linking to that website.
I have a very minor quibble with one thing Ken said, though. He says “no one has a relationship with Spamhaus volunteer, they’re all anonymous.” This isn’t exactly true. Spamhaus volunteers do reveal themselves. Some of them go around openly at MAAWG with nametags and affiliations. A couple of them are colleagues from my early MAPS days. Other do keep their identities secret, but will reveal them to people they trust to keep those identities secret. Or who they think have already figured it out. There was one drunken evening at MAAWG where the nice gentleman I was joking with leaned over and says “You know I am elided from Spamhaus, right?” Uh. No? I didn’t. I do now!
But even though I have the semi-mythical personal relationship with folks from Spamhaus, it doesn’t mean my clients get preferential treatment. My clients get good advice, because I know what Spamhaus is looking for and can translate their requirements into solid action steps for the client to perform. But I can think of half a dozen ESP delivery folks that have the same sorts of relationships with Spamhaus volunteers.
Overall, relationships are valuable, but they are not sufficient to fix inbox delivery problems.

Delivery emergencies and the holidays

There is a lot of contention between ISPs and senders at the best of times. As we move into the holiday season, retailers are increasing their email marketing, sometimes quite significantly. This causes more delivery issues as recipients and MTAs react to the increased volume.
At many non retail companies, however, the pace of work slows down. There are distractions and office parties and people taking long lunches to finish their holiday shopping. Non-critical departments are not staffed for official holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.
This means that delivery issues may not be responded to as quickly as senders might like. Just this morning I got a call from someone who wants his delivery issues to be fixed by tomorrow. I’m sorry, even if I were to treat this as an emergency, there is work and investigation that needs to be done at the ISP end, and they’re not necessarily going to have a staffed delivery desk on Thanksgiving day. And even if they do have a staffed desk, it’s possible the staff won’t be focused and issues won’t be handled as fast as they might otherwise be.
I’d love to help, but there’s a limit to what I can do. Filtering decisions are made by the ISP, or their filter vendor, and sometimes they don’t happen as fast as we’d like. It’s frustrating for senders to have to deal with, but these are the realities of email delivery.

AOL Postmaster page hacked

Per Boing Boing: the AOL postmaster page was hacked over the weekend.
As of now the site is restored. But I’m hearing that all the scripts are still down. This means no one can open tickets, sign up for FBLs, apply for whitelisting or check the status of reports. I expect this will be fixed soon, but for now it looks like AOL issues are going to be impossible to resolve.

Gmail abuse and postmaster addresses

A long time ago, Steve wrote a post about setting up abuse and postmaster addresses for Google hosted domains. Google has gone through a couple iterations of the interface since then, as you can see by the comment stream.
I checked with some people who have Google hosted domains and they have confirmed that abuse@ and postmaster@ addresses can be set up by creating a group. When you create the group you can then add yourself to the group and get the mail that comes into abuse@ and postmaster@.

Facebook Postmaster page

There’s still quite a bit of concern and worry about how the Facebook messaging platform is going to affect marketing. One thing that may help is the Facebook postmaster page. There’s all sorts of good information on those pages, reflecting the years of experience that their messaging team has in running large platforms.
Some points worth mentioning.

AOL announces new postmaster pages

The new AOL postmaster pages are live at http://postmaster.info.aol.com/

ISP Postmaster Pages

I’ve been working on some reference information about ISPs for my own internal use as well as sharing with clients. There doesn’t seem to be any public reference site for postmaster sites, so I decided to publish what I’ve collected.

AOL Postmaster Support down Jan 16th through Jan 20th

AOL just posted that the backend of their postmaster support ticketing system will be down over the from January 16th through January 20th. This means that while new tickets can be opened, work will not proceed on them until the system is back up on Jan 20th. I expect this also means that any tickets in the system might be delayed as well.

Google Apps – where's my abuse@

Most ISP feedback loops require you to demonstrate that you’re really responsible for your domain before they’ll start forwarding reports to you. The usual way that works is pretty similar to a closed-loop opt-in signup for a mailing list – the ISP sends an email with a link in it to the abuse@ and postmaster@ aliases for your domain, and you need to click the link in one or both of the emails to continue with the feedback loop signup process.
That’s mostly there to protect you, by making sure that someone else can’t get feedback loop messages for your domain. And it’s not too difficult to do, as you should already have an abuse@ and postmaster@ alias set up, and have someone reading the abuse@ alias.
But maybe you’re using Google Apps to host your corporate email, and that’s the domain you need to use for your feedback loops. So you go to create abuse and postmaster users, but it won’t let you – you just get the error Username is reserved for email list only. Uhm, what?
Google want to police use of domains hosted on their service, so they automatically set up abuse and postmaster aliases for your domain, and any mail sent to them is handled by Google support staff. You may well be happy with Google snooping on your abuse role account, but you really need to be able to read the mail sent to it yourself too.
So what to do? Well, the way Google set things up they actually create invisible mailing lists for the two role accounts, and subscribe Google Support to the lists. In older versions of Google Apps you could make those mailing lists visible through the user interface by trying to create a new mailing list with the same name, then simply add yourself to the mailing list and be able to read your abuse@ email.
But Google broke that functionality in the latest version of the Google Apps control panel, when they renamed email lists to “groups”. If you try and create a new group with the email address abuse@ your domain you’ll get the error Email already exists in this domain, and no way to make that list visible.
So, what to do?
Well, there’s a workaround for now. If you go to Domain Settings you can select the “Current Version” of the control panel, rather than the “Next Generation” version. That gives you the old version of the control panel, where all this worked. Then you can go to User Accounts, create a new email list delivering to abuse@ and add one of your users to the mailing list. You can then set the control panel back to “Next Generation” and have access to the mailing lists via Service Settings → Email → Email Addresses.
Hopefully Google will fix this bug, but until they do here’s the step-by-step workaround:

New AOL postmaster blog

AOL has their new postmaster blog up and running at http://postmaster-blog.aol.com/. Today they announced new tools over there including a FBL checking tool and a block checking tool.