Send Actual SMTP

It’s rare I find mail that violates the SMTP spec (rfc5321 and rfc5322). I’ve even considered removing “send mail from a correctly configured mail server” from my standard Best Practices litany.

But today I got mail asking me to respond to a survey.

This whole email is a mess of problems, and it’s claiming to be from the California Secretary of State.  It’s also discussing the June Primary, which isn’t the election we just had. The from address doesn’t reassure me, they’re claiming to be: VotersChoice.SoS.Ca.Gov@mailservices6.com. The mail is being sent to the address I gave California when I registered as an overseas voter, but those lists are public.

In the course of trying to decide if this was real or was just some way to steal private information, I discovered this particular mail server isn’t actually sending real SMTP.

X-Amavis-Alert: BAD HEADER SECTION, Non-encoded non-ASCII data (and not UTF-8) (char 9C hex): Received: \x{9C}by v1.mailservi

Now, quite honestly, I suspect this is actually legitimate mail. A few google searches and I discover mailservices6.com belongs to California Survey Research Services, Inc. They manage data collection for a lot of different government agencies. Looking at information around them this is exactly the kind of vendor that I expect a government agency to use.

I have to wonder, though, how well their email surveys actually perform. They’re not sending actual SMTP. The non-ASCII character is in their own internal handoff to a server running an obsolete version of Sendmail. While our mail server is somewhat forgiving of non-SMTP mail not all mail servers are. Even if that isn’t enough to tank their delivery, there are multiple similar but not identical domain names in the body of the message. The link to ‘research.net’ doesn’t actually go to research.net, it points to yet another random domain name. Put all this together with the unsolicited nature of the email I’d be amazed if any of their mail was reaching the inbox at the consumer ISPs.

Looks like I’ll be keeping the “and make sure you send SMTP” in the list of recommendations, because there are still groups out there who are not sending valid SMTP. If my mail is to be believed, some of them are being paid by the state of California to do so.

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The perfect email

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authenticated
Email is a fluid and ever changing landscape of things to do and not do.
Over the years my clients have frequently asked me to look at their technical setup and make sure that how they send mail complies with best practices. Previously, this was a good way to improve delivery. Spamware was pretty sloppy and blocking for somewhat minor technical problems was a great way to block a lot of spam.
More recently filter maintainers have been able to look at more than simple technical issues. They can identify how a recipient interacts with the mail. They can look at broad patterns, including scanning the webpages an email links to.
In short, email filters are very sophisticated and really do measure “wanted” versus “unwanted” down to the individual subscriber levels.
I will happily do technology audits for clients. But getting the technology right isn’t sufficient to get good delivery. What you really need to consider is: am I sending email that the recipient wants? You can absolutely get away with sloppy technology and have great inbox delivery as long as you are actually sending mail your recipients want to receive.
The perfect email is no longer measured in how perfectly correct the technology is. The perfect email is now measured by how perfect it is for the recipient.

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The complaint asserts that the defendants defamed Shiva in their articles, caused him economic harm and inflicted emotional distress on him.
Today the judge dismissed the case (Memorandum and Order, pdf from ReCAP) against Michael and Leigh.  The legal standard for punishable defamatory statements is there must be a way to prove them true or false. The judge ruled that since there is not a single definition of email, that there is no way to definitively prove Techdirt’s statements as true or false.
No one disputes the Shiva coded a system that encompasses the features we expect of any desktop or web based mail client. As many people have mentioned, the fact he was 14 and put together a complex program is impressive in and of itself. No one is disputing what he did accomplish.
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According to Ars Technica, Shiva is going to appeal the dismissal.
EDIT: Techdirt has posted an article on the lawsuit and the dismissal.
 

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