Recent Posts

Gmail showing authentication results to endusers

A bit of older news, but worth a blog post. Early in August, Gmail announced changes to the inbox on both the web interface and the android client. They will be pushing authentication results into the interface, so end users can see which emails are authenticated.

These are not deliverability changes, the presence or absence of authentication will not affect inbox delivery. And the gmail Gmail support pages clarify that lack of authentication is not a sign that mail is spam.
This isn’t a huge change for most ESPs and most senders. In fact, Gmail has reported more than 95% of their mail is authenticated with either SPF or DKIM. Now, Gmail does a “best guess” SPF – if it looks like an IP should be authorized to send mail for a domain (like the sending IP is the same as the MX) then it’s considered authenticated.
It’s good to see authentication information being passed to the end user.

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Ongoing subscription attack

Brian Krebs posted a couple days ago about his experience with the subscription bomb over the weekend. He talks about just how bad it was over the weekend.

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Spamhaus comments on subscription attack

Steve Linford, CEO of Spamhaus commented on my blog post about the current listings. I’m promoting it here as there is valuable information in it.

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Improving Outlook Email Display

Today Litmus announced they had partnered with Microsoft to fix many of the rendering issues with Outlook. Congrats, Litmus! This is awesome. I know a lot of folks have tried to get MS to the table to fix some of the problems with Outlook. Take a bow for getting this off the ground.
According to Litmus, the partnership has two parts.

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Subscription bombing, ESPs and Spamhaus

A number of ESPs woke up to a more-than-usually-bad Monday morning. Last night Spamhaus listed 10s of networks, including ESPs, on the SBL. The listings all contained the following note:

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Ask Laura: What should we be measuring?

The Golden Gate at Sunset

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Are you (accidentally) supporting phishing

One of the themes in some of my recent talks has been how some marketers teach their customers to become victims of phishing. Typically I’m talking about how companies register domains “just for email” and then use those for bulk messages. If customers get used to mail from company.ESP.com and companyemail.com they’re going to believe that company-email.com is also you.
There are other ways to train your customers to be phishing victims, too. Zeltzer security walks us through a couple emails that look so much like phishing that it fooled company representatives. Go take a read, they give a number of examples of both good and bad emails.
biohazardmail
I was a little frustrated that the examples don’t include headers so we could look at the authentication. But the reality is only a teeny, tiny fraction of folks even know how to check headers. They’re not very useful for the average user.
Security is something we should never forget. As more and more online accounts are tied to our email addresses those of us who market to email addresses need to think about what we’re teaching our recipients about our company. DMARC and other authentication technologies can help secure email, but marketers also need to pay attention to how they are communicating with recipients.

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Learning to fish

I am honored to be included in the Learn to Fish document built by Adobe.

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Email Marketing as News?

This afternoon I got mail. It’s clearly meant to be a tie-in to something. But, the thing is, I don’t know what.
DoorDashWizard
That’s the problem with contextual marketing, you never really know if your target will understand the context.

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BT Internet

I’ve been seeing reports for the last few weeks that a lot of folks are having problems getting mail into BT Internet. Many people are reporting the response

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