Recent Posts

DMARC Interoperability

Facebook hosted a DMARC interoperability event earlier this week. In terms of protocol development, interoperability events are a sign that the protocol is ready for more widespread use.

Handling replies to bulk mail

This week’s Wednesday question comes from Ryan W.

I’ve been noticing a few e-mail accounts who reply to our e-mail sends with spammy type replies such as, “hey this is intense…..(link)” what do you think should we be removing those e-mails from our mailing?
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Return Path partners with Symantec

Today Return Path announced a partnership with Symantec to improve their anti-phishing product. Return Path is incorporating the Symantec Trusted Domain List into their authentication and filtering product to help customers protect their brands. Press Release
Phishing scams affect everyone, and having a brand that is used in phishing can reduce consumer trust in that brand. Protecting brands in email has been one of the more difficult challenges facing the email community. With the adoption of DKIM and DMARC by major brands and ISPs it has become easier to track and address phishing.

October?

I had a realization a few days ago that next week is October. Where did the year go? Blogging is likely to be light in October, I’m at multiple conferences (OTA next week, MAAWG at the end of the month).
Please stop by and introduce yourselves if you’re at either conference. I always love to meet readers.

Thinking of increasing email frequency for the holidays?

Then you have to read this post by Dayne Shuda on EmailCritic. How to handle Email Frequency During the Busy Holiday Season.

What causes Spamhaus CSS listings

Today’s Wednesday Question comes from Zaib F.

What causes the Spamhaus CSS listing in your experience other than Sender using multiple sets of IPs, to look as if they are a valid sender. Do you think a Spamtrap plays a role?
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The naming of lists

Any ESP that supports multiple mailing lists per customer lets you name your mailing lists. That’s useful for keeping track of where a list was from , but sometimes those list names are visible to the recipient:

Here the list name is visible on the opt-out / email preferences form, but you’ll also see them in (hidden) email headers or (visible) email footers.
“Last 10000” is pretty innocuous, but I’ve seen “Non responders”, “Vegas blast”, “Opt-outs 2010”, “Jigsaw 3”, “Purchased 2011-07-01″, Trade 2”, “Co-reg 4” as well as lists named after companies completely unrelated to the list owner.
You could check to see whether the list names are visible on every ESP and mail platform you use – or you could just assume they will be visible to end users eventually and be always careful in naming them.

Harvesting is alive and well

I’m finding out that email address harvesting off websites is alive and well on the Internet. We have a rotating address on the contact page, which does get harvested but usually the spam is attempting to sell me blog related services. I didn’t expect to get a very different collection of emails to the address I posted here. I’m quite surprised that address is getting a completely different type of spam from the contact address.
The one thing that harvesters appear to have in common is sending CAN SPAM violating email. Both the contact address and the questions address get lots of mail that is in violation of US (and California) law. One of these days I might get bored enough to file a suit against one of them and blog about it.

Links: September 24, 2012

Last week Return Path announce a new set of email intelligence products. One of their new products offers customers the chance to actually see how (some subset of) their customer base interacts with mail directly. It moves beyond simply looking at probe mailboxes and actually looks inside the mailbox of recipients.
Spamhaus has listed bit.ly on the Domain Blocklist (DBL) for allowing spammers to abuse their redirector service. Spammers have been abusing bit.ly for a while, and I’m a little surprised it’s taken so long for a listing to happen. Steve wrote a post last year about URL redirectors and offered suggestions on what to do to avoid blocking problems when using a URL shortening service.
Real Insights has a very interesting post on why it should be “hard” to subscribe to your mailing list. There are also a number of good suggestions about the subscription process itself. Definitely worth a read.

More awesome than email

This morning was the final flight of the Space Shuttle Endeavor. In fact, it was the last flight of any shuttle ever, anywhere. We were lucky enough to get passes to NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field to watch the flyover.