Microsoft MXs changed over

Microsoft Send

• josh
• Technical

Microsoft Send is a new mail client by Microsoft for iPhones and soon Windows Phone and Android phones. Send is designed to send quick, short messages to contacts. Instead of building a chat application build on a proprietary protocol, Send sends and receives its messages over email and uses your existing mailbox to handle the messages. What makes Send neat is that I can start a conversation within the app and when I get back to my computer, I can log into Outlook Web Access and continue the conversation.

 
Messages to and from the Send app do not utilize subjects lines.
 
Sending a message from my personal account with Office365 to my Word to the Wise account and the email looks like any other email I received except with the #Send on the subject line.

 
The message goes through the same outbound mail servers as if I sent it from Outlook or OWA, so emails pass SPF.
 

 
If you are signing with DKIM, the emails will be signed and authenticated.

 
(Office365 will sign emails with DKIM soon, it’s on the Office RoadMap.)
For an email to show up within the Send app, the subject contains #Send.
Microsoft has taken a unique approach to building a messaging app that utilizes existing SMTP infrastructure. If you’re sending to a tech savvy list, take a look at your logs to see how many recipients are using Microsoft Send and consider reaching out to them specifically using #Send.
 

October 2017: The Month in Email

• laura
• Industry

October was a busy month. In addition to on boarding multiple new clients, we got new desks, I went to Toronto to see M³AAWG colleagues for a few days, and had oral surgery. Happily, we’re finally getting closer to having the full office setup. 

What is an office without a Grover Cat? (he was so pleased he figured out how to get onto it at standing height).

All of this means that blogging was pretty light this month.
One of the most interesting bits of news this month is that the US National Cybersecurity Assessments & Technical Services Team issued a mandate on web and email security, which Steve reviewed here.
In best practices, I made a brief mention about the importance of using subdomains rather than entirely new domain names in links and emails and even DKIM keys.
We’ve talked about engagement-based filters before, but it’s interesting to note how they’re being used in business environments as well as consumer environments.
We also put together a survey looking at how people use Google Postmaster Tools. The survey is now closed, and I’ll be doing a full analysis over the next couple of weeks, as well as talking about next steps. I did a quick preview of some of the highlights earlier this week.
Finally, a lot of industry news this month: Most notably, Mailchimp has changed its default signup process from double opt-in to single opt-in. This caused quite a bit of sturm und drang from all ends of the industry. And, in fact, a few days later they announced the default double-opt-in would stay in place for .eu senders. I didn’t get a chance to blog about that as it happened. In other news, the Road Runner FBL is permanently shuttered, and Edison Software has acquired Return Path’s Consumer Insight division. Also worth noting: Microsoft is rolling out new mail servers, and you’ll likely see some new — and potentially confusing — error codes.
My October themed photo is behind a cut, for those of you who have problems with spiders.

The cycle goes on

• laura
• Best practices

Monday I published a blog post about the ongoing B2B spam and how annoying it is. I get so many of these they’re becoming an actual problem. 3, 4, 5 a day. And then there’s the ongoing “drip” messages at 4, 6, 8, 12 days. It is getting out of control. It’s spam. It’s annoying. And most of it’s breaking the law.
But, I can also use it as blog (and twitter!) fodder.