Recent Posts

e360 v. Comcast: part 2

Yesterday, I talked about e360 filing suit against Comcast. Earlier this week, Comcast responded to the original filing with some filings of their own.

A few weeks ago I very briefly touched on the recent lawsuits filed by e360 against Comcast and a group of anti-spammers. In the Comcast suit (complaint here) e360 argues that Comcast is unfairly and incorrectly blocking e360’s email and are liable for damages to e360’s business.
They have a number of claims, including

Ken speaks the truth

Ken Magill has a great article up today about how many marketers expect their ESPs to fix their delivery problems when in reality the marketers policies and practices are the real problem.

Unauthenticated email

A few weeks ago, NetworkWorld posted an interview with Mark Risher of Yahoo. In it, Mark talked about how Yahoo had no plans to outright block or refuse any unauthenticated email. Of course authentication will be a large part of their decision making for incoming emails but they cannot just refuse to accept mail that is unauthenticated, because there are times when unauthenticated email is the most important mail to their recipients.
A lot of marketers often seem to forget that they are competing for time and space with other, non-marketing, types of email. Email from friends and family and discussion lists are both more important to most people that the latest and greatest email advertisement. These are the emails people want to receive, the ones they open, read and respond to.
In terms of authentication, right now the majority of wanted emails are unsigned with DK or DKIM. Sure there are the early adopters who are using DK/DKIM to sign their emails, and a few large ISPs have started signing outgoing email. But until the vast majority of wanted email is actually signed, recipient ISPs are going to have to accept unsigned email.
Looking forward, even if all of the ISPs sign email sent through their SMTP servers, there will still be some fraction of desired email that will be unsigned. Individuals and small businesses who choose to run their own mailservers may not sign email. Even though these servers make up a tiny fraction of total email, they make up a much larger fraction of wanted email. ISPs cannot block this email without angering their customer base.
Marketers should not be concerned about ISPs blocking unauthenticated email, as it is extremely unlikely that any major ISP will do that. Marketers should focus, instead on making their email relevant and wanted by the recipients. I have been recommending clients plan to have all their outgoing emails DK/DKIM signed by the end of 2008.

Roadrunner turns images off by default

Earlier this week DirectMag published an article talking about RoadRunner blocking images by default. I did talk to someone over at RoadRunner and found out a few more details about this change.
What is happening is that RR is rolling out a new web interface. This interface has both a bulk/spam filter and has images disabled by default.
I do not expect sender to notice this change in the open rates of RoadRunner addresses. Most RoadRunner customers use their own mail client (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc.) and not the RR web interface. The number of uses this change touches is a very small fraction of the RR users.

Yahoo delays, part 3: Yahoo speaks

Yahoo is aware of the recent problems and have been working feverishly to fix them. A Yahoo employee posted to a mailing list earlier today, explaining some of the recent issues. The summary is:
1) The Yahoo delays are a result of a tighter spam filtering policy. The delays are the result of the system erroneously recognizing email as spam and deferring delivery. They do believe that retrying long enough will result in all mail being delivered to Yahoo recipients.
2) They have been continually making fixes to the system over the last few days and senders should see queues start to empty over the next few hours.
3) They believe the adjustments made will resolve the deferral problems. If you continue to see problems, you can contact them through the form at http://postmaster.yahoo.com/.
4) They are working to provide more self-serve information at http://postmaster.yahoo.com/ as well as timely service updates.
Loose ends from my previous Yahoo posts:

Yahoo delays, part 2

A number of people have posted to various mailing lists and made blog posts pointing to the Yahoo Mail blog post discussing recent problems Yahoo was having with mail. The general feeling seemed to be “AHA! That’s what is wrong!”
Unlike many of my peers, I do not think this explains the delivery problems senders have been seeing while attempting to deliver mail to Yahoo. The Yahoo mail blog article is talking about the Yahoo outgoing mailservers (smarthosts) for their non-webmail users. It is extremely unlikely that these are the same servers used for incoming email.
While I sympathize with everyone who had the AHA! moment and thought their delivery problems were being acknowledged and addressed by Yahoo! I do not think this is really what that blog post is saying.
I am hearing from people that Yahoo is aware of a problem with delayed incoming email, and they are working on fixing it. This does seem to be a broader problem than just bulk mailers, I am hearing from small and mid-size ISPs that they are having significant problems delivering email to Yahoo, too.
For more information about what Yahoo is doing to filter mail check out my previous post Greylisting: that which Yahoo! does not do.

Yahoo delays

You may have noticed increase in delays and rejections from Yahoo. I am certainly seeing a lot of customers complaining and hearing a lot of other delivery people commenting on problems getting mail into Yahoo. I have even heard from multiple ISPs that are struggling with full queues and delayed email.
No solutions or suggestions right now, just that everyone is having problems right now. I expect it will take some time for the backlogs to dissipate, even after the underlying problem is fixed. If I hear anything more I will post it here.

Ironport response

Last week I posted about a ESP that had a misconfiguration in their Ironport A60s that let spammers use the A60s to relay email to AOL. Earlier this week, Pat Peterson from Ironport approached me to talk about the problem and clarify what happened.
Ironport has provided me with the following explanation.

How to be a spammer

JD had a comment on my Valentines day semi-fluff post, that really summed up the reality for senders. He said