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A DKIM primer resurrected

I was looking for some references today back in old blog posts. This means I discover some old links are dead, blog posts are gone or moved, and information is lost.
In this case it’s a post by J.D. Falk on deliverability.com. The link is dead (it looks like the whole website is dead), but I found a copy of his post and am reproducing it here. I don’t have permission, because I can’t get permission from him, but the content is extremely useful and I don’t want it lost.

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Podbox Expert Interview Series

Last month I did an interview with Podbox about email, deliverability and how I became an email expert (breaking things, lots of breaking things… and having to pick up the pieces and fix them…)
Check out the interview over on their website.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about history and longevity. Next year will mark 10 years of the Word to the Wise blog and 20 years of me entering the anti-spam / deliverability space. That’s a lot of time. When I first started fighting spam it was really about my mailbox and getting rid of the junk I was receiving. At the time, a lot of people thought it was silly to spend so much effort fighting spam.
But as time as gone on, email spam and fraud became a big deal. Criminals realized they could use spam to further their gains at the expense of people. Spam is a network problem. Spam is a danger.
Personally, I’ve moved away from fighting spam. I’m now working more on making and keeping email a useful tool. Yes, that does include commercial email. Yes, it does include bulk email. Helping people get the mail they want in their inbox is a part of keeping the email ecosystem healthy. It’s the part I can do and the part I am good at.
Seeing email become such an important part of commerce, communication and modern life has been a journey. I look forward to seeing where the next 20 years takes us.
 

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My panels from #EEC16

I had the privilege to be a part of two panels at EEC16, with some of the best folks in the business.
The first panel was “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Deliverability, but Were Afraid to Ask.”  eec_deliv_slide
We had a lot of great audience questions.
The first question, which was awesome (and I don’t think planted) was: “What is the most important thing we can do to improve our deliverability?”
All of us had really similar answers: pay attention to your data and your acquisition. Deliverability starts with your data: good data = good deliverability, poor data = poor deliverability. How you acquire addresses is vital to any email program.
I’ve had dozens of sales calls with potential clients over the years. Most of them tell me lots of stuff about their marketing program. I hear details of engagement, data hygiene, response rates, CTRs, bounce handling. But very, very few people spontaneously tell me how they’re acquiring addresses. That’s so backwards. Start with acquiring addresses the right way. Deliverability is all in the acquisition step. Of course, you need to nurture and care for those subscribers, sent the right message at the right time and all the good things we talk about. None of that matters if you don’t start with good data.
Another question was about spamtraps. The panel had me take this one. I’ve written extensively about spamtraps and what they do and what they mean. The important thing to remember, though, is that a spamtrap is a signal. If you have spamtraps on your list, then there is a problem with your data acquisition. Somehow, people are getting addresses that do not belong to them on the list.
Spamtraps are a problem, but not for the reasons many people think they are problems. Folks get upset when their mail is blocked because of spamtraps. Blocking isn’t the only damage, though. For every spamtrap on a list that is one less responsive addresses. It’s one customer who you are not reaching. If there are spamtraps on a list, it’s likely there are deliverable addresses that don’t belong to your customers, too. These recipients are going to view that mail as spam. They didn’t sign up, they didn’t ask for it, they don’t want it. They’re going to complain, hurting your reputation. Too many of these recipients and delivery will suffer.
Spamtraps are a warning that something is wrong. That something is usually your data acquisition process.
Questions went on through the session and ranged from things like how to get mail to B2B inboxes and is there value in certification. We also had some insightful questions about authentication.
The second panel I was on was the closing keynote panel: “ISP Postmasters & Blacklist Operators: Defending Consumer Inboxes.” This was where I got to show my incoming mail chops, a bit. I was a last minute fill in for the panel and I am honored that Dennis and Len thought I could represent the incoming mail folks. It’s not like I’m out there writing filters, but I do pay attention to what the filter operators are saying and doing.
I think it is important for marketers to get a feel for what’s really going on at the ISPs. They aren’t trying to stop real mail, they’re trying to stop malicious mail. Matt from Comcast talked a lot about how marketers and ISPs share customers and the ISPs are trying to keep those customers safe and happy. Jaren discussed some of the decision making processes his company goes through deciding whether to err on the side of letting spam through or filtering good mail. Tom discussed how his blocklist works with some brands to help stop phishing attacks against those brands.
Overall, I think the session was a great success. The conference was great and I am looking forward to going back next year.
Were you at either panel? What did you think?
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Insight into Gmail filtering

Last week I posted a link to an article discussing how Gmail builds defenses to protect their users from malicious mail. One of the things I found very interesting in that article was the discussion about how Gmail deploys many changes at once, to prevent people from figuring out what the change was.
Let’s take a look at what Gmail said.

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Ask Laura: Can you help me understand no auth / no entry?

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Dear Laura,
I’m a little confused by the term “no auth / no entry”. Gmail and other major receivers seem to be moving towards requiring authentication before they’ll even consider delivery.
Does this just mean SPF and DKIM, or does this mean the much more stringent DMARC, as well?
Thanks,
No Shirt, No Shoes, No What Now?

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Thoughts on filters

One of the questions we received during the EEC16 closing keynote panel was why isn’t there a single blocklist that everyone uses and why don’t ISPs share data more. It would be so much easier for senders if every ISP handled mail the same as every other. But the world isn’t that simple, and it’s not always clear which mail stream is spam and which is good mail.

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Dueling data

One of the things I miss about being in science is the regular discussions (sometimes heated) about data and experimental results. To be fair, I get some of that when talking about email stuff with Steve. We each have some strong view points and aren’t afraid to share them with each other and with other people. In fact, one of the things we hear most when meeting folks for the first time is, “I love it when you two disagree with each other on that mailing list!” Both of us have engineering and science backgrounds, so we can argue in that vein.
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One of the challenges of seemingly contradictory data is figuring out why it seems to disagree. Of course, in science the first step is always to look at your experimental design and data collection. Did I do the experiment right? (Do it again. Always do it again.) Did I record the data correctly? Is the design right? So what did I do differently from what you did? For instance, at one of my labs we discovered that mixing a reagent in plastic tubes created a different outcome from mixing the reagent in glass vials. So many variables that you don’t even think of being variables that affect the outcome of an experiment.

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Thoughts from #EEC16

EEC16 was my first Email Experience conference. I was very impressed. Dennis, Len, and Ryan put together a great program. I made it to two of the keynotes and both took me out of an email focused place to look at the bigger picture.
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Patrick Scissons discussed his experiences creating marketing and advertising campaigns for good and to share messages. Some of the campaigns were ones I’d seen as a consumer, or on the news. One of the campaigns he talked about specifically was for the group Moms Demand Action, looking at sensible gun control in the US. The images and symbology used in those campaigns were striking and very effective.
Kelly McEvers talked about her experiences as a correspondent in the middle east during the Arab Spring. She is an engaging speaker, as one who does radio should be. Her overall message and theme was that sometimes events are such that you need to throw the list away and go with it. As someone who lives by “the list” and tries to make sure I’m prepared for every eventuality I found that a very useful message. Particularly when throwing away “the list” turned into some massively successful stories.
In terms of sessions, I found the email content session fascinating. I blogged about content in email last week and did some live tweeting, too. What really hit me after that session was that good marketing drives deliverability. Everything that Carey Kegel was talking about in terms of better marketing, sounded like things I recommend to clients to drive deliverability.
Back in 2012 I was writing posts about how delivery and marketing were somewhat at odds with each other. The premise was that marketing was about creating mindshare, and repeating a message so often a recipient couldn’t forget it. In email, repetition can cause recipient fatigue and drive delivery problems. But what I’m hearing now, from the leading minds of email marketers, is that email marketing works better if you send relevant and useful information to consumers. Recipients are key and you can’t just keep hammering them, you have to provide them with some value.
It seems marketing has finally come around to the delivery point of view.
 
 

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March 2016: The Month In Email

Happy April! I’m just back from the EEC conference in New Orleans, which was terrific. I wrote a quick post about a great session on content marketing, and I’ll have more to add about the rest of the conference over the next week or so. Stay tuned!
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Here’s a look at what caught our attention in March:
On the DMARC front, we noted that both Yahoo and mail.ru are moving forward with p=reject, and Steve offered some advice for ESPs and software developers on methods for handling this gracefully. I also answered an Ask Laura question about making the decision to publish DMARC. Look for more on that in this month’s Ask Laura questions…
Our other Ask Laura question this month was about changing ESPs, which senders do for many reasons. It’s useful to know that there will generally be some shifts in deliverability with any move. Different ESPs measure engagement in different ways, and other issues may arise in the transition, so it’s good to be aware of these if you’re contemplating a change.
In industry news, I wrote a sort of meta-post about how the Internet is hard (related: where do you stand on the great Internet vs. internet debate? Comment below!) and we saw several examples of that this month, including a privacy debacle at Florida State University. Marketing is hard, too. I revisited an old post about a fraud case where a woman sued Toyota over an email marketing “prank”. As always, my best practices recommendation for these sorts of things (and everything else!) really boils down to one thing: send wanted email.
Steve wrote extensively about SPF this month in two must-read posts, where he explained the SPF rule of ten and how to optimize your SPF records. He also wrote about Mutt, the much-loved command line email client, and marked the passing of industry pioneer Ray Tomlinson, who, in addition to his many accomplishments, was by all accounts a very thoughtful and generous man.
Finally, I occasionally like to take a moment and follow the twisty paths that lead to my spam folder. Here’s a look at how Ugg spams my email doppelganger, MRS LAURA CORBISHLEY. In other spam news, there’s a lot of very interesting data in the recent 10 Worst list from Spamhaus. Take a look if you haven’t seen it yet.

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Don't mess with my email

One thing we tell clients is that people consider their mailbox a very personal space. They’re offended when people invade that personal space without permission, sometimes to an extent that doesn’t seem proportional to the scale of the offense. And we advise senders who have been invited into the inbox to treat it with respect.
Google don’t seem to realize that.
Today, they replaced one of the two “Send Mail” buttons (and the associated key sequence that people have in their finger memory) with one that silently attached a Minions mic-drop gif to the mail, and then hid any future replies to that mail thread. Quite apart from the fact that people use their gmail accounts for professional communications, this is also sabotaging what many people consider their most personal online space. (And, to make it worse, they had a bug such that sometimes the gif would also be added to mail using the other “Send Mail” button).
There’s No Way This Could Go Horribly Wrong.
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People were very, very unamused. Google had already pulled the feature by the time I heard about it this morning.
Never take peoples’ mailboxes for granted. Never.

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