Recent Posts

The cycle goes on

Monday I published a blog post about the ongoing B2B spam and how annoying it is. I get so many of these they’re becoming an actual problem. 3, 4, 5 a day. And then there’s the ongoing “drip” messages at 4, 6, 8, 12 days. It is getting out of control. It’s spam. It’s annoying. And most of it’s breaking the law.
But, I can also use it as blog (and twitter!) fodder.

Reaching targets, the wrong way

I’ve been increasingly annoyed by these drip automation campaigns. You know the ones I mean. Senders use some software to find some flimsy pretext to send a mail. Then there emails drop every few days. Sometimes this cycle goes on for months. Most of these messages violate CAN SPAM. It’s annoying. It’s illegal. It is spam.
I can even opt out of most of these messages, they don’t offer that ability.

Final migration of Verizon email addresses to AOL

AOL were kind enough to share some details about the shutdown of the Verizon mail system and the migration of @verizon.net email address to the AOL mail service:

CASL Private Right of Action Delayed

Today the Canadian Government announced they were suspending the provision that allows individuals to sue marketers for violations of CASL.
Under these provisions, individual Canadian consumers had a private right of action. Any Canadian could sue any company that sent mail violating the law. This part of the law upset many senders and marketers. I’m sure many are relieved at this delay in enforcement.

This delay has no effect on the other major CASL provision with a July 1, 2017 deadline.
On July 1 a 3 year waiver on implied consent collected prior to CASL will end. What does that mean? Implied consent is just what it sounds like. Under certain conditions, senders can assume they have legal consent to mail the recipient. These conditions are spelled out in Section 10(9) of the law. Implied consent expires after 2 years. However, companies were granted a 3 year waiver on this provision for email addresses collected prior to July 1, 2014.
The waiver allowed senders to continue mailing addresses with implied consent even after the 2 year expiration. This was to allow companies time to convert implied consent into express consent as to not lose recipients. There are about 3 weeks left for senders to get explicit permission to continue mailing addresses collected prior to July 1, 2014.
Additionally, as of July 1, 2017 CASL requires a parliamentary committee to review the law and its operation over the last 3 years.

Many senders are thrilled with the indefinite suspension of the PRA. It was, I think, one of the parts of the law that worried people the most. Allowing any citizen to sue someone who sent them mail they thought violated CASL? That concept struck fear into the hearts of many a legitimate marketer. I was never quite so sure it was going to be as bad as some thought.
A few years ago I had the opportunity to sit in a conference session with an individual from the Canadian government. They explained that there were significant barriers to individuals suing senders. Plaintiffs must file in provincial courts, not local ones. Second, defendants couldn’t be under investigation by the CRTC and a PRA at the same time. The presenter implied that CRTC had priority over any joint defendant. Finally, the plaintiff must prove actual damages. This is difficult for defendants that use a freemail provider like Gmail. There aren’t really damages in that case.
The overall gist of the session was that PRA in Canada was not that simple. Individuals wanting to sue had some bigger hoops to jump through than just filing something in small claims court. Nevertheless, I’m sure that many senders are relieved to hear the PRA is indefinitely suspended.

Women. Technology. Moving Forward.

A little over a year ago, Kristin Bond posted an article (reprinted here) looking at the diversity of speakers at marketing conferences. As with many articles pointing out gender issues in technology there was quite a bit of discussion about it on a related mailing list. Some of the comments were supportive and open to the idea that gender diversity is an overall good. Some of the comments, while well meaning, indicated the commenters didn’t understand some of the more systemic issues that result in conferences with speaker lists that consist primarily of white men.
Kristin, I, Jen Capstraw and April Mullen started talking privately about the issue. What I discovered during those conversations is that I wasn’t alone in how I felt about some spaces. Being a woman in tech I expect to feel left out in many places. When I go to a conference, or I participate in an online space or I meet up with colleagues in social situations, I expect that someone will say something sexist. As a woman I regularly feel like an outsider. What I didn’t realize is other women in those same spaces felt the same way. By not saying something I was missing an opportunity to find a supportive atmosphere with other women who also thought spaces were unfriendly or toxic to women.
But we didn’t just complain; we decided to take action. What would happen if we created a space to help conferences find women speakers? What would happen if we set up a framework for women to find mentors? What did we have to lose by trying? Thus, Women of Email™ was formed.

Disappearing domains

On May 31, British broadband provider EE discontinued service for a number of email domains: Orange.net, Orangehome.co.uk, Wanadoo.co.uk, Freeserve.co.uk, Fsbusiness.co.uk, Fslife.co.uk, Fsmail.net, Fsworld.co.uk, and Fsnet.co.uk.
These domains were acquired by EE as part of multiple mergers and acquisitions. On their help page, EE explains that the proliferation of free email services with advanced functionality has led to a decrease in email usage at these domains.
Yesterday, Terra.co.br announced they were discontinuing email to a number of their free domains as of June 30, 2017: terra.com, terra.com.ar, mi.terra.cl, terra.com.co, terra.com.mx, terra.com.pe, terra.com.ve, and terra.com.ec.

I’m not surprised to see these domains going away and I think we’ll see more of it going forward. The reasons are pretty simple. Mail is not an easy service to run. Mail doesn’t bring in a lot of money. Dedicated mailbox providers do a great job and the addresses from them are portable.

Appending in a nutshell

A few months ago a colleague sent me, and every other person on his overly large LinkedIn list, an email looking for some help hiring. It starts off with “Greetings LinkedI Connections” and ends with… an unsubscribe link.

Purchased lists aren't always purchased

Spamhaus has listed a number of domains belonging to French politicians recently. In their blog post about it, they mention that the listings are directly related to address lists provided to candidates by the French government.

Are they using DKIM?

It’s easy to tell if a domain is using SPF – look up the TXT record for the domain and see if any of them begin with “v=spf1”. If one does, they’re using SPF. If none do, they’re not. (If more than one does? They’re publishing invalid SPF.)
AOL are publishing SPF. Geocities aren’t.
For DKIM it’s harder, as a DKIM key isn’t published at a well-known place in DNS. Instead, each signed email includes a “selector” and you look up a record by combining that selector with the fixed string “._domainkey.” and the domain.
If you have DKIM-signed mail from them then you can find the selector (s=) in the DKIM-Signature header and look up the key. For example, Amazon are using a selector of “taugkdi5ljtmsua4uibbmo5mda3r2q3v”, so I can look up TXT records for “taugkdi5ljtmsua4uibbmo5mda3r2q3v._domainkey.amazon.com“, see that there’s a TXT record returned and know there’s a DKIM key.
That’s a particularly obscure selector, probably one they’re using to track DKIM lookups to the user the mail was sent to, but even if a company is using a selector like “jun2016” you’re unlikely to be able to guess it.
But there’s a detail in the DNS spec that says that if a hostname exists, meaning it’s in DNS, then all the hostnames “above” it in the DNS tree also exist (even if there are no DNS records for them). So if anything,_domainkey.example.com exists in DNS, so does _domainkey.example.com. And, conversely, if _domainkey.example.com doesn’t exist, no subdomain of it exists either.
What does it mean for a hostname to exist in DNS? That’s defined by the two most common responses you get to a DNS query.
One is “NOERROR” – it means that the hostname you asked about exists, even if there are no resource records returned for the particular record type you asked about.
The other is “NXDOMAIN” – it means that the hostname you asked about doesn’t exist, for any record type.
So if you look up _domainkey.aol.com you’ll see a “NOERROR” response, and know that AOL have published DKIM public keys and so are probably using DKIM.
(This is where Steve tries to find a domain that isn’t publishing DKIM keys … Ah! Al’s blog!)
If you look up _domainkey.spamresource.com you’ll see an “NXDOMAIN” response, so you know Al isn’t publishing any DKIM public keys, so isn’t sending any DKIM signed mail using that domain.
This isn’t 100% reliable, unfortunately. Some nameservers will (wrongly) return an NXDOMAIN even if there are subdomains, so you might sometimes get an NXDOMAIN even for a domain that is publishing DKIM. shrug
Sometimes you’ll see an actual TXT record in response – e.g. Yahoo or EBay – that’s detritus left over from the days of DomainKeys, a DomainKeys policy record, and it means nothing today.

Random thoughts on spammers

I recently received a 419 spam that had a message at the top of the email.

Yup, a 419 spammer is trying to convince me there are millions of dollars waiting for me, but he won’t pay his software vendor 29.99 to comply with a license.
This is only the most recent in a long line of examples of spammers being cheap and attempting to steal services.
Back when I was working abuse almost every ISP had a story about a spammer who refused to pay their bill. Or spammers who were so high maintenance they cost the company money.
The company I worked for had a spammer that was on our system for far too long. Eventually they were cut off for non-payment and their hardware was confiscated. Still, the spammer came in and managed to remove the hardware before the building guards were alerted. It was disappointing, but at least they weren’t spamming off our network any longer.
Even now, ESPs share stories of customers who come in, spam and never pay their bill. Works for the spammer, they can get a few weeks of spamming in without having to pay for the service. They spew their stuff and leave a giant mess for the ESP to clean up. Next week, they’re on to the next ESP.
The real problem with this is that with enough ESPs and enough sends you can clean a list. This list can then be sold, or moved to a credible ESP without any of the tell tale signs of a purchased list. It’s so common it even has a name: waterfalling. It’s profitable, though, and there are enough small ESPs out there with little compliance experience that it can work.
I regularly get questions from folks who’ve worked themselves into a hole about swapping IPs or domains in order to get out of the hole. My answer is always the same. Changing identity might work in the short term, but it won’t work longer term. I also tell them that spammers have been trying to avoid filters for a lot longer than they have. Spammers are good at it, and still get caught in filters. Better to spend time trying to fix the underlying problem – typically users aren’t engaged with your mail – then trying to obfuscate who is sending the message to avoid filters.
Focus on sending good email that users want, rather than trying to avoid filters. That’s the key to getting into the inbox.