Recent Posts

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.

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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.

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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

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Valentine's day semi-fluff

There comes an inevitable point in some of my longer term consulting gigs where my client asks me some version of the following question:

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Articles I read today

It has been a rather busy day today, I do not have a full blog post. I did see a couple posts come across my RSS feeds. Both of them have content I want to talk about and discuss in a little more detail, as I think they touched on some very interesting issues.
Network World has an article interviewing Mark Risher from Yahoo. The article discusses Yahoo’s use of DomainKeys as part of their inbound mail filtering.
Mickey has an article about how to deal with ISPs when attempting to troubleshoot a blocking issue.
More details and commentary on both articles later this week.

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ESP unwittingly used to send spam

Late last week I heard from someone at AOL they were seeing strange traffic from a major ESP, that looked like the ESP was an open relay. This morning I received an email from AOL detailing what happened as relayed by the ESP.

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Email authentication

The great folks over at MailChimp have compiled a list of which authentication methods (DK, DKIM, SPF and SenderID) are in use at which ISPs.
Good stuff and very clear showing who is using what authentication.

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CAN SPAM compliance.

Over on the ET blog, Al posted about how CAN SPAM compliance is not sufficient for you to not be spamming.
It’s a bit different perspective, but very complimentary to my post yesterday about what is and is not spam. He and I have both heard from ISP people about how many requests for whitelisting or unblocking are prefaced with, “We comply with CAN SPAM” and how meaningless that statement really is. Al has a longer discussion of why.

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What really is "spam" anyway?

A few days ago I was reading the attempt by e360 and Dave Linhardt to force Comcast to accept his mail and to stop people posting in the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email from claiming he is a spammer. The bit that pops out at me in this complaint of his, is the fact that he believes that by complying with the minimal standards of the CAN-SPAM act, he is not spamming.
The problem with this claim is that CAN SPAM lists the minimal standards an email must meet in order to avoid prosecution. CAN SPAM does not define what is spam, it only defines the things senders must do in order to not be violating the act. There is no legal definition of spam or of what is not spam.
To add to the confusion there are a number of confusing and contradictory definitions of spam. Definitions people have used over the years include:

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Updating SenderID records for Microsoft

In the past, bulk senders who wanted Microsoft to check SenderID had to email information to a special Microsoft address. Microsoft would then cache the senderID data from the sender’s DNS records and verify incoming email.
Microsoft has simplified the process and now has a webform to submit the data.
http://support.msn.com/…
In order to submit your information you will need a contact email address, the domains that you want to add and the SPF records of those domains.

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