Recent Posts

Opting out of “service” messages

A frequent question in a number of deliverability spaces is how to tell if a message is transactional or marketing. In most cases the decision is related to whether or not to respect an unsubscribe request. All too often companies decide that their messages are too important to allow someone to opt-out of. The problem is, in some cases, there is no longer a customer relationship to send notices about.

Details matter

I field a lot of delivery questions on various online fora. Often people try and anonymise what they’re asking about by abstracting out the question. The problem is that there are very few answers we can give in the abstract.

Microsoft and SPF

Many deliverability folks stopped recommending publishing SPF records for the 5322.from address to get delivery to Microsoft. I even remember Microsoft saying they were stopping doing SenderID style checking. A discussion on the emailgeeks slack channel has me rethinking that.

Why is DMARC failing?

Multiple times over the last few weeks folks have posted a screenshot of Google Postmaster tools showing some percentage of mail failing DMARC. They then ask why DMARC is failing. Thanks to how DMARC was designed, they don’t need to ask anyone this, they have all the data they need to work this out themselves.

New Deliverability Resource

The nice folks over at Postmark shared a new deliverability resource last week. The SMTP Field Manual. This is a collection of SMTP responses they’ve seen in the wild. This is a useful resource. They’re also collecting responses from other senders, meaning we can crowdsource a useful resource for email deliverability folks.

False 550 responses from Verizon

This week there was a reported uptick in user unknown responses for verizon email addresses. The specific response folks were seeing was:

Conferences and Pac Man

On the emailgeeks slack channel someone asked for advice about going to conferences. There were lots of great suggestions. I threw in the Pac Man Rule and realised a lot of folks haven’t heard of it before.

Tulsi v. Google: 1st amended complaint

Friday the Tusli Gabbard campaign filed the expected first amended complaint against Google for suspending her adwords account immediately after the first Democratic debate. A full copy of the complaint is available.

Profiting off spam

The FTC filed suit against Match.com for using fake accounts to entice people into signing up for accounts. (WA Post) Part of the FTC’s allegations include that Match flagged the accounts and prevented them from contacting paying Match users while simultaneously allowing the users to contact free Match users.

An open is not permission

A decade or so ago I was helping a client troubleshoot a Spamhaus listing. They, as many companies do, had a database with addresses from a number of different sources. Spamhaus was asking for them to reconfirm the entire database, which they didn’t want to do. I came up with the idea that if we had some sign of activity on the email address, like an open or a click and some other corresponding activity related to that open or click then we could assume that the address was likely a real user and was interested in the emails.