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.

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Spamhaus and Gmail

Today’s been chock full of phone calls and dealing with clients, but I did happen to notice a bunch of people having small herds of cows because Spamhaus listed www.gmail.com on the SBL.
“SPAMHAUS BLOCKS GOOGLE!!!” the headlines scream.
My own opinion is that Google doesn’t do enough to police their network and their users, and that a SBL listing isn’t exactly a false positive or Spamhaus overreaching. In this case, though, the headlines and the original article didn’t actually get the story right.
Spamhaus blocked a range of IP addresses that are owned by Google that included the IP for www.gmail.com. This range of IP addresses did not include the gmail outgoing mailservers.
Spamhaus says

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ESPs leaking email addresses

Two of my tagged email addresses started getting identical pharma spam over the weekend. It is annoying me because I am now getting spam in a mailbox that was previously spam free. The spam is overwhelming the real traffic and I am having to make some decisions about what to do with the email addresses and their associated accounts with the companies I gave them to.
One thing I did notice, though, is that both companies use iContact as their ESP. A cursory check of my other mailboxes shows that none of my other tagged addresses are mailed through iContact. I don’t think it’s very likely that these two individual, unrelated companies made deals with the same spammers to sell address lists at the same time. It’s much more likely that there was a compromise somewhere and address lists were stolen.
Edit: Checked my other account and, likewise, I’m getting the same spam to a 3rd address serviced by iContact. I’ve sent mail to all 3 companies involved and we’ll see how they react.
And, as I was thinking about this, iContact just laid off a bunch of staff about the same time they announced their partnership with Goodmail. Based on past history with companies in this situation, it seems possible this is a disgruntled former employee. I’ve also seen reports from other people noticing spam to addresses given to iContact customers.

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Is Google failing DKIM keys shorter than 512 bits?

Today’s Wednesday question comes from Andrew B. and got pushed to Thursday so I could check a few more facts.

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