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.

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AOL Postmaster page changes

AOL has disabled the IP reputation check and the rDNS lookup on their postmaster pages. Given AOL isn’t handling the first mail hop any longer, this makes perfect sense. They simply don’t have the kind of data they did when they were handling mail directly from the sender MTA.
There’s no information, yet, on whether or not that functionality will be added / replicated over at Yahoo.

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Email predictions for 2015

Welcome to a whole new year. It seems the changing of the year brings out people predicting what they think will happen in the coming year. It’s something I’ve indulged in a couple times over my years of blogging, but email is a generally stable technology and it’s kind of boring to predict a new interface or a minor tweak to filters. Of course, many bloggers will go way out on a limb and predict the death of email, but I think that’s been way over done.
ChangeConstant
Even major technical advancements, like authentication protocols and the rise of IPv6, are not usually sudden. They’re discussed and refined through the IETF process. While some of these changes may seem “all of a sudden” to some end users, they’re usually the result of years of work from dedicated volunteers. The internet really doesn’t do flag days.
One major change in 2014, that had significant implications for email as a whole, was a free mail provider abruptly publishing a DMARC p=reject policy. This caused a lot of issues for some small business senders and for many individual users. Mailing list maintainers are still dealing with some of the fallout, and there are ongoing discussions about how best to mitigate the problems DMARC causes non-commercial email.
Still, DMARC as a protocol has been in development for a few years. A number of large brands and commercial organizations were publishing p=reject policies. The big mail providers were implementing DMARC checking, and rejection, on their inbound mail. In fact, this rollout is one of the reasons that the publishing of p=reject was a problem. With the flip of a switch, mail that was once deliverable became undeliverable.
Looking back through any of the 2014 predictions, I don’t think anyone predicted that two major mailbox providers would implement p=reject policies, causing widespread delivery failures across the Internet. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted it, all of my discussions with people about DMARC centered around business using DMARC to protect their brand. No one mentioned ISPs using it to force their customers away from 3rd party services and discussion lists.
I think the only constant in the world of email is change, and most of the time that change isn’t that massive or sudden, 2014 and the DMARC upheaval notwithstanding.
But, still, I have some thoughts on what might happen in the coming year. Mostly more of the same as we’ve seen over the last few years. But there are a couple areas I think we’ll see some progress made.

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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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