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Their network, their rules

Much of the equipment and wires that the internet runs on is privately owned, nor is it a public utility in the traditional sense. The owners of the property have a lot of leeway to do what they like with that property. Yes, there are standards, but the standards are about interoperability. They describe things you have to do in order to exchange traffic with other entities. They do not dictate internal policies or processes.

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Apple one time email addresses

At WWDC 2019 Apple announced “Sign in with Apple.” This is a service that allows iOS users to log into different applications with private, dedicated email address. When developers send mail to that address, Apple will forward it to the email address associated with the users AppleID. App developers that offer any third party log in will be required to also offer AppleID log in.

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ESPs are failing recipients

Over the last few years I’ve reduced the complaints I send to ESPs about their customers to almost nothing. The only companies I send complaints to are ones where I actually know folks inside the compliance desk, and I almost never expect action, I just send them as professional courtesy.

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Google Suspicious Link Warnings

A number of folks in the sender space are reporting intermittent “This link may be suspicious” warnings on their emails. I first heard about it a few weeks ago from some clients. One wasn’t sure what was going on, the other found a bunch of malware uploaded into their customer accounts.

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Techdirt lawsuit settled

Back in 2017 Techdirt wrote a series of articles about Shiva Ayyadura. Shiva claims he invented email. (narrator voice: he didn’t). I wrote about the lawsuit when it was dismissed on First Amendment grounds. The parties cross appealed, and have been in settlement talks for 18 months.

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What’s up with gmail?

Increasingly over the last few months I’ve been seeing questions from folks struggling with reputation at Gmail and inbox delivery. It seems like everything exploded in the beginning for 2019 and everything changed. I’ve been avoiding blaming it all on TensorFlow, but maybe the addition of the new ML engine really did fundamentally change how things were working at gmail.


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Rethinking public blocklists

Recently, a significant majority of discussions of email delivery problems mention that neither the IPs or domains in use are on any of the public blocklists. I was thinking about this recently and realised that, sometime in the past, I stopped using blocklists as a source of useful information about reputation.

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Congratulations Return Path

Return Path acquired by Validity

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ESPs and deliverability

There’s an ongoing discussion, one I normally avoid, regarding how much impact an ESP has on deliverability. Overall, my opinion is that as long as you have a half way decent ESP they have no impact on deliverability. Then I started writing an email and realised that my thoughts are more complex than that.

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CRTC fines individual for company violations under CASL

The Commission finds that nCrowd, Inc. committed one violation of paragraph 6(1)(a) and one violation of paragraph 6(2)(c) of Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (the Act) in relation to commercial electronic messages sent to recipients in Canada. The Commission also finds that Brian Conley is liable, under section 31 of the Act, for those violations. Accordingly, the Commission imposes an administrative monetary penalty of $100,000 on Brian Conley. CRTC
Icon of a courthouse

The commission’s report is well worth a read as it discusses many of the things I’ve noticed from spamming operations over the years. It’s pretty standard business practice for spammers to have a complex set of sorta but not really different businesses. They all interact and share data, but not legal liability. They’re mostly treated as one business by the principles and there’s no real dedication to any one brand name.

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