Recent Posts

Edison acquires part of Return Path

Today Matt Blumberg announced that Edison Software acquired Return Path’s Consumer Insight division, current customers and some Return Path staff.
Congrats to everyone involved.

Mailchimp changes signup process

As of October 31, 2017 signup forms and popup boxes provided by Mailchimp will no longer default to a double / confirmed opt-in process.

RR FBL: it's officially dead

The Roadrunner Postmaster page says the FBL is deactivated.

Road Runner is no longer providing a FBL starting today. Earlier this morning a couple ESPs were reporting a decrease in FBL messages from the RR FBL. A few hours later, a senior technical account manager confirmed on mailop that the FBL was ending today.
While the announcement says that folks can expect reports to trickle, at least one ESP has reported zero reports today.

The feds are deploying DMARC

The US National Cybersecurity Assessments & Technical Services Team have issued a mandate on web and email security, including TLS+HSTS for web servers, and STARTTLS+SPF+DKIM+DMARC for email.
It’s … pretty decent for a brief, public requirements doc. It’s compatible with a prudent rollout of email authentication.

Troubleshooting and codes

Microsoft is still in the process of rolling out new mail servers. One thing that is new about these is some new codes on their error messages. This has led to questions and speculations as to what is going on.

Tell us about how you use Gmail Postmaster Tools

One of the things I hear frequently is that folks really want access to Google Postmaster Tools through an API. I’ve also heard some suggestions that we should start a petition. I thought a better idea was to put together a survey showing how people are using GPT and how high the demand is for an API.
They’re a data company, let’s give them data.

I’ve put together a survey looking at how people are using GPT. It’s 4 pages and average time to take the survey is around 7 minutes. Please give us your feedback on GPT usage.
I’m planning on leaving the survey open through the first week in November. Then I’ll pull data together and share here and with Google.

Figuring out email

Engagement filters for B2B mail

While I was doing some research for a client today I rediscovered Terry Zink’s blog. Terry is one of the MS email folks and he regularly blogs about the things MS is doing with Outlook.com and Office 365.
The post that caught my eye was discussing the Microsoft Spam Fighter program. The short version is that in order to train their spam filters, Microsoft asks a random cross-section of their users if the filters made the right decision about email. This data is fed back into the Microsoft machine learning engine.
As Terry explains it:

Desks and distractions

Our first real company purchase was a big. solid pair of desks. See, we owed a lot of money to the IRS, but if we bought some equipment we could decrease the amount we had to pay the IRS. So we invested in very nice, wooden desks that would hold heavy CRT monitors.
Things have changed over the years and we don’t have CRTs any more. And maybe it’s time to upgrade or replace our desks. We got my desk assembled this weekend and I have to say, I’m really pleased.

Steve wrote about our experiences Autonomous.ai‘s purchase process. I have to say I’m impressed with the build quality of the desks.
I’ll be happy when our office is rebuilt and everything is back in its place, but even now I’m enjoying working at my new desk.