… until it stops moving

gotzombie

Nothing is impossible to kill. It’s just that sometimes after you kill something you have to keep shooting it until it stops moving.Mira Grant, Feed

It’s getting to the time of year when I can get away with some horror movie metaphors. Today, things that are dead.
1. ADSP
ADSP was a domain repudiation scheme that should never really have lived, but thankfully it’s now dead. If you see “_adsp._domainkey” in DNS somewhere, kill it with fire.
(Don’t confuse it with DMARC, it’s much improved spiritual successor.)
2. SenderID
SenderID was a slight variant of SPF created by Microsoft and pitched for a while as “SPF version 2”. If you see “spf2.0/” in a DNS TXT record, beat it down with a shovel.
3. DomainKeys
DomainKeys served valiantly as a prototype, but has been entirely replaced by it’s successor, DKIM. Nobody is paying any attention to DomainKeys signatures, certainly not for mail that’s also signed with DKIM.
It’s dead. Completely dead. So if you see “DomainKey-Signature:” in an email somewhere, shoot it until it stops moving.
 
 

Related Posts

DKIM is Done

This was posted to the IETF DKIM Working Group mailing list this morning:

Read More

Data hygiene

I talk about data hygiene with clients a lot. In my experience, poor data hygiene is the number one reason that legitimate, permission based marketing ends up in the junk folder. Too many marketers don’t remove abandoned addresses from their mailing lists. As the abandoned addresses build up, eventually the list accumulates enough zombie addresses that it looks similar to a spammer’s list.
I’ve talked in depth about zombie accounts previously (part 1, part 2, part 3, apocalypse) and they talk a lot more about why we have zombies accounts and why they’re just starting to be a bigger issue for marketers. Not only are we just starting to hit critical mass with zombie accounts, but ISPs are really starting to weigh engagement in their delivery decisions. Zombie accounts are not engaged with mail. Heck, they’re not even engaged with their own email addresses.
Many marketers, though, hate the idea of data hygiene. They hate thinking about losing a potential customer. They can show me numbers that say someone didn’t open an email for 18 months and then spent hundreds of dollars on a purchase. Or they can tell me that 10% of their revenue came from people who hadn’t opened an email in more than 12 months.
I don’t want to take those subscribers away from you, the ones who are engaged with your brand or your mail in some un-trackable way. But I do want to stop the zombies from eating your delivery.

Read More

Increase in bounces at Y!

I’ve been seeing reports over the last few days about an increase in bounces at Yahoo. Reliable people are telling me they’re seeing some increase in “invalid user” bounces.
You may remember Yahoo announced an overhaul of their mail product back in December. Reliable sources tell me that this is more than just interface revamp. In the back end, Yahoo! is removing older products with few users and security problems. This fits in with the changes CEO Mayer has been making with the company: slim down and stop supporting unprofitable products.
It makes sense that while engineers are looking at the guts of the email program and cleaning up the cruft, they will also disable long unused email addresses. This will result in higher unknown users for some senders.
What’s interesting to me is that the reports are somewhat sporadic. Some senders are seeing a huge percentage of bounces, some are seeing the normal percentage. I expect this difference isn’t anything more than how actively a sender purges based on engagement. Senders that purge unengaged addresses are going to have already removed a lot of the addresses Yahoo! is now purging from their database. Senders that keep sending to their whole list, are going to see a lot of unknown user bounces.
I’ve asked a few folks and people who’ve responded told me that spot checks showed all the addresses turning up as invalid had no engagement for long periods of time.
If you are seeing a lot of bounces at Yahoo! over the last few days, you need to remove those addresses from your lists. I also recommend looking at the engagement statistics of these newly purged recipients. This will tell you, approximately, what an abandoned address profile looks like. You can use that information to make good decisions about purging unengaged users at other ISPs as well. Not only does this lower costs, because you’ll be sending to less non-responsive email addresses, it will also improve delivery at many ISPs.

Read More