Email news today

Ironport have rolled out an update to their rule engine which has a bug causing mail problems. According to discussion on the mailop list, the new rule engine is folding the header with a line feed (LF) rather than a carriage return (CRLF). This is breaking things, including DKIM signatures. Ironport is aware of the issue. I expect an updated rollout shortly.

AOL migrated the last few users onto the Yahoo infrastructure today. It’s really gone. Also, while looking up some info related to this post, I discovered Verizon Media has a postmaster blog hosted on Tumblr.

I’ve seen a number of reports in different areas talking about an increase in Yahoo user unknowns. The same thing happened almost a year ago. This may be when Yahoo does clean up or it could be a coincidence. Folks at Verizon Media are looking into it

Be careful purchasing lists of DigiMarCon NY 2019 Attendees. There’s at least one list being sold out there that is just a scraped list of addresses. I’ve gotten emails asking for meetings and offering services because I am on the exhibitor list. I’m actually not on the exhibitor list, nor have I ever been to that conference in any capacity.

Verizon Media Postmaster Site
Dead addresses tell us things

Related Posts

OATH and Microsoft updates

I’ve seen multiple people asking questions about what’s going to happen with the Yahoo and AOL FBLs after the transition to the new Oath infrastructure. The most current information we have says that the AOL FBL (IP based) is going away. This FBL is handled by the AOL infrastructure. As AOL users are moved to the new infrastructure any complaints based on their actions will come through the Yahoo complaint feedback loop (CFL). The Yahoo CFL is domain based. Anyone who has not signed up for the Yahoo CFL should do so.
When registering you will need each domain and the selectors you’re planning on using. Yahoo will send an email with a confirmation link that needs to be clicked on within a short period of time in order to activate the FBL.
Microsoft’s SNDS program had an outage at the end of last week. That’s been fixed, but the missing data will not be back populated into the system. This has happened a couple times in the past. It seems the system gets a live feed of data. If, for some reason, the data is interrupted, then it’s gone and doesn’t get populated.

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Happy 2018

This is the time of year when everyone starts posting their predictions for the coming year. Despite over a decade of blogging and close to 2500 blog posts, I have’t consistently written prediction articles here. Many years I don’t see big changes on the horizon, so there’s not a lot to comment on. Incremental changes are status quo, nothing earth shattering there. But I’ve been thinking about what might be on the horizon in 2018 and how that will affect email marketing.

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Whitelisting is dead

A decade or so ago I was offering whitelisting services to clients. It was pretty simple. I’d collect a bunch of information and do an audit on the customer’s sending. They’d get a report back identifying any issues that would limit their chances at acceptance. Then I’d go and fill in the forms on behalf of the client. Simple enough work, and it made clients feel better knowing their mail was whitelisted at the various ISPs.
When email filters were less complex and more binary, whitelists were a great way for receivers to identify which senders were willing to stand up and be held accountable for their mail. Over time, whitelists became much less useful. Filtering technology progressed. Manual whitelisting wasn’t necessary for ISPs to sort out good mail from bad.
The era of whitelisting is over.
In fact, three of the major whitelist providing ISPs were AOL, Yahoo, and Verizon; all three are now a part of OATH. The Verizon whitelist page now redirects to postmaster.aol.com. New requests to signup for the AOL whitelist are rejected with the message that AOL whitelisting is no longer available or necessary. Yahoo has a “new IP review” form rather than a whitelisting form.
Whitelisting is dead.
Even the various certification and whitelisting services have mostly gone away. Both Habeas and Goodmail failed to achieve a profitable exit event. Of course, Return Path is still around, but they have built a platform of tools and services unrelated to whitelisting or certification.
Now senders are going to have to focus on sending mail that people ask for and want in order to make it to the inbox.
 

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