Don't mess with my email

One thing we tell clients is that people consider their mailbox a very personal space. They’re offended when people invade that personal space without permission, sometimes to an extent that doesn’t seem proportional to the scale of the offense. And we advise senders who have been invited into the inbox to treat it with respect.
Google don’t seem to realize that.
Today, they replaced one of the two “Send Mail” buttons (and the associated key sequence that people have in their finger memory) with one that silently attached a Minions mic-drop gif to the mail, and then hid any future replies to that mail thread. Quite apart from the fact that people use their gmail accounts for professional communications, this is also sabotaging what many people consider their most personal online space. (And, to make it worse, they had a bug such that sometimes the gif would also be added to mail using the other “Send Mail” button).
There’s No Way This Could Go Horribly Wrong.
drop
People were very, very unamused. Google had already pulled the feature by the time I heard about it this morning.
Never take peoples’ mailboxes for granted. Never.

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Things you need to read: 2/5/16

gearheadAsk the Expert: How Can Email Marketers Stay Out of Gmail Jail and in the Inbox? The expert in question is an old friend of mine, Andrew Barrett. I met Andrew online in the late 90s, and we worked together (briefly) at MAPS. He was out of email for a while, but I’m pleased he came back to share his talents with us. The information in the article is valuable for anyone who struggles with getting to the Gmail inbox.
Unclutter Your Inbox, Archive & Keep Your Messages. Shiv Shankar talks about some new features at Yahoo Mail. With a simple click, you can archive email so it’s available to search, but not cluttering up your inbox. One of the things that jumped out at me from that article is that Yahoo is providing 1 TB of storage. That’s more than Google!
The EEC is doing a survey on the impact of CASL and want to hear from marketers. Go check out their blog post and take their survey.
Sparkpost has a guest blog from Alex Garcia-Tobar, co-founder of Valimail about common DKIM failures. I’ve met Alex a few times and I’ve always found him a pleasure to talk to. Alex is somewhat new in the email space, but he really gets some of the challenges in the authentication space. A lot of the issues he mentions in that blog post like lack of key rotation and shared keys are some of the technical debt I was talking about in my predictions for 2016 post.
What links have you read this week that are worth sharing?

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SPF debugging

Someone mentioned on a mailing list that mail “from” intuit.com was being filed in the gmail spam folder, with the warning “Our systems couldn’t verify that this message was really sent by intuit.com“. That warning means that Gmail thinks it may be phishing mail. Given they’re a well-known financial services organization, I’m sure there is a lot of phishing mail claiming to be from them.
But I’d expect that a company the size of Intuit would be authenticating their mail, and that Gmail should be able to use that authentication to know that the mail wasn’t a phish.
Clearly something is broken somewhere. Lets take a look.
Looking at the headers, the mail was being sent from Salesforce, and (despite Salesforce offering DKIM) it wasn’t DKIM signed by anyone. So … look at SPF.
SPF passes:

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Filter complexity

URLBlockingForBlogDuring the Q&A last week, I mentioned an example of a type of filter trying to demonstrate how complex the filters are. There was some confusion about what I was saying, so I thought I’d write a blog post explaining this.

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