Recent Posts

The history of email

My first access to “the internet” was through a dialup modem on a VAX at the FDA. I was a summer intern there through my college career and then worked full time after graduation and before grad school. My email address ended in .bitnet. I could mail some places but not others. One of the places I couldn’t send mail was to my friends back on campus.
A few of those friends were computer science majors, so one weekend they tried to help me troubleshoot things. . There were text files that they ended up searching through looking up how to send mail from .bitnet to .edu. But it was all a baffling experience. Why couldn’t it just work? I had email, they had email, why could we not talk?
I never did figure out how to send email to campus from .bitnet.
Eventually, the FDA moved from BITNET to the internet and I had a .gov address. I could send mail around just by getting the recipients’s address. But the mystery of why I could mail some .edus and not others still lingers. I wonder what our setup was that we couldn’t send mail. I’ll probably never know. I don’t even have enough details to explain the problem to someone who would know. I suspect the answer will be “bang paths” or “host.txt” files, but I really don’t know.

Changing deliverability thinking

Almost every email marketing program, at least those sending millions of emails per campaign, have delivery problems at one time or another. The problems seem random and unpredictable. Thus most marketers think that they can only address delivery problems, they can’t prepare or prevent them.
On the delivery side, though, we know deliverability problems are predictable. There are situations and events in a company’s marketing program that increase deliverability risks.
I talked a little bit about this with Derek Harding at a recent conference. I started talking about my ideas that deliverability is not random and that companies need to stop treating it as unpredictable. He pulled together a great article from our discussions. Head over to ClickZ to read about it: Take control of your email deliverability.

The predictability of deliverability is something I’m going to be writing more about in the coming months. This is, I think, the next challenge for email marketers. Figuring out how to incorporate deliverability into their overall marketing strategy. Successful programs need to take ownership of getting to the inbox. Deliverability isn’t an emergency, because it’s been planned for and managed throughout a program.

Brief blogging break

Sorry about the unexpected hiatus. I picked up a cold that really made me feel fuzzy and writing was an exercise in futility. I’ll be back Monday.
Meanwhile, Oracle bought another ESP (Bronto) when they bought NetSuite.

Working around email security

One of the common things I see as a delivery consultant is that companies do their best to set effective policies about email, but make it difficult to comply with those policies. It happens all the time. It’s one of the reasons that the tweets Steve shared about Sec. Clinton’s email server rang so true to me.

One of the commenters on that post disagrees, and uses banks and health care as an example.
Erik says:

SPF ?all

The most read post on the blog is Authenticating with SPF: -all or ~all. In fact, it’s in the top 5 posts every single day. We still get comments on it, too. Usually from folks who disagree with my recommendations.
I still stand by my recommendations, though. It doesn’t really matter if you choose ~all or -all in your SPF records. Why? No major provider is rejecting mail solely because of a SPF fail. They may bulk the mail, but they won’t reject it. That’s why, in a deliverability context, it doesn’t matter which one you choose.
My one rule for SPF is never use ?all. Just. No. In the spec, ?all is “testing” mode. But it really is a signifier that the person who put the SPF record together doesn’t know what they’re doing. Unless they really are testing, but even then you shouldn’t see ?all on records for weeks or months.
~ or – never ?

Do you know where your signups are?

Here at Word to the Wise we sign up for a lot of email from our customers. There are multiple reasons we do this.

Almost Caturday

It’s Friday. It’s been a week.
Have a cat picture.

Electronic records outside US not covered by US warrants

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Government today in US Government vs. Microsoft. The government is investigating a drug dealer and want access to records held by Microsoft. Microsoft turned over metadata stored on US machines. But they refused to turn over the specific emails stored on machines in Dublin. The company’s position is that the federal government needs to follow the rules of the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty between the US and Ireland.
This has been winding its way through the appeals court.
The court’s ruling today states “§ 2703 of the Stored Communications Act does not authorize courts to issue and enforce against U.S.‐based service providers warrants for the seizure of customer e‐mail content that is stored exclusively on foreign servers.”
An interesting ruling, and I see pros and cons to the ruling. It does complicate anti-spam enforcement a bit and make it easier for criminals to hide their data overseas while they might be in the US. But it’s already easy for them to do that. Many arrests of spam gangs and others for crimes committed on the Internet over email involve multiple law enforcement agencies across the world.
Full text of the ruling (.pdf link)

US-EU Privacy Shield Approved

Since the Safe Harbor rules were struck down by EU courts, the US and EU have been in negotiations to replace it. This morning (pacific time) the EU approved the new rules called Privacy Shield. WSJ Article

Politician sends spam, experiences consequences, news at 11

Over the weekend I’ve been seeing a number of over the top, hyperbolic blog posts about the Trump Campaign’s agency getting suspended from their ESP for spamming. Adestra suspended the Donald Trump campaign for “for committing some of the most egregious spamming in the history of the Internet in an effort to save his broke campaign.”
That quote about “most egregious spamming” is from some partisan website that is all about making Trump look bad. I did actually laugh out loud reading most egregious. Let’s be real here. This incidence of spamming doesn’t even make it into the top 100 of the ones I know about. And it’s not like I’m particularly well up on who’s spamming what.
This really is business as usual in the email space and particularly the political email space. Political sender, be they special interest groups or politicians, are sloppy with permission and will send mail to any email address they get their hands on. I talked about this last week: Spam Filtering is Apolitical

The Trump campaign isn’t the first political campaign to send spam. It wasn’t huge news in 2012, but the Romney campaign was doing some bad stuff with their email marketing. They were working with snowshoe spammers. They were listed on the SBL. They got cut off by their ESP.
While Spamhaus doesn’t keep historic records, I found a post from 2012 on the “Mainsleaze” about the Romney campaign / supporters and their use of spam as a campaign tactic. In the comments on that post a representative of Spamhaus says, “Entirely too many political operatives and some of those who work with them at ESPs feel entitled to ignore the usual rules and send opt-out bulk email to anybody they wish.” This is true, and something I’ve repeatedly mentioned on this blog.