Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

Emanuel writes: "I need assistance with Senderbase. What ISP report to Senderbase? Is there a way to view Senderbase complaints? We add all ours IPs in the feedback loop, but not in the feedback loop of Yahoo. Is it possible that the lack of a Yahoo feedback loop is the pr…

Google has long provided support for the list-unsubscribe header (as defined in RFC 2369 ) in Gmail. It is listed in their bulk sender guidelines as "strongly recommended." Meaning that if you're a good guy sender, it is expected that you will implement support f…

Over on the Litmus blog, Chad White shares why marketers shouldn't panic or try to disable the list-unsubscribe header on their email messages. Great insight, and the research aligns with what I've been seeing as well.

It's kind of rare, but not rare enough. Every now and then I hear of a client who is seeing intermittent DKIM failures at Microsoft Outlook.com/Hotmail properties. A Delivery Team Lead for one of the bigger ESPs posted about this on the Mailop list recently, looking for fee…

Are you one of the many millions of unlucky souls receiving spammy calendar invites? Apple is apparently aware of and working to address this type of thing, according to the iMore blog. But if you can't wait for that, the Verge has a few suggestions on what you can do abo…

Can't beat that headline. UK ISP Virgin Media is having a few problems with its spam filters, reports the Register. Previously hosting user mailboxes on Google-managed systems, the ISP was forced to bring it back in house after Google stopped selling the service to ISPs. A…

Over on the Word to the Wise blog, Laura Atkins explains what happened with that spate of short-term MegaRBL DNSBL listings you may have noticed last week.

Time for a distraction. The Staunton (VA) News Leader reports on the Virginia Military Institute's Spam challenge, wherein chefs are tasked to "create an entree and two sides using only five mystery ingredients and anything from the pantry, which was comprised of items…

Hey, November and December are a big, important time period for online retailers. Lots of people always ask me what they should do to minimize the risk of deliverability problems during this period. Keeping in time that ISP email volumes are up (way up), ISP staff managing unbl…

Google announced an updated version of the Gmail email client for iOS devices today . The big new enhancements seem to be "undo," "swipe to archive or delete" and a faster search function. There does not appear to be any support at all for list-unsubscribe f…

Just a few more days until the election, and then everybody can calm down and get back to their normal lives, I hope. Every time I read the Washington Post, I see another article about email servers or weird DNS server activity. It's tiring. I don't have the strength or…

Founded in 2003, Barracuda Networks provides anti-spam and security-related hardware and services and was believed to have more than 150,000 clients as of 2014. Looks like if Barracuda hosts your spam filtering or mail services, you might not be receiving email right now. Multi…

Jess Nelson of MediaPost's EmailMarketing Daily shares news of the first-ever email client for the Xbox : MailOnX. Though, designers, I wouldn't necessarily start worrying about focusing your email marketing design efforts on Xbox as a platform JUST yet.

SC Magazine shares details of a Symantec report identifying student loan forgiveness spam as a path for the unwitting to get infected with malware . Particularly timely, given all the news lately about for profit colleges shutting down, leaving ex-students wondering what comes …

Wendy Davis of MediaPost reports on a challenge to the TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act), the US law that is the basis of US prohibition against unsolicited text messaging. The challenger: Facebook. The defender: the government. Read more about it here .

It is being reported that Yahoo! Mail has disabled the ability for users to enable email forwarding. If you already have the feature enabled, you might be fine. But if not, there's no turning it on now. Conspiracy theorists say it's a play to keep people from leaving Ya…

If you received an email message in your Gmail inbox, Google provides easy-to-read authentication results, showing you if the email message in question properly passed SPF authentication. But what if you want to check a proposed SPF record, a potential change, to see if it is …

A few months ago, I posted about " SPF Lockdown ," a simple way to use an SPF (sender policy framework) DNS record to tell the world that a given domain sends no mail. Email/anti-abuse industry group M3AAWG has some useful guidance that goes even further. Back in Dec…

On Thursday, AOL launched iOS and Android versions of "Alto," a "proprietary email intelligence engine built to analyze and restructure the mountain of valuable data buried across multiple inboxes," aka a fancy new email client with time-saving email-sorting…

ISP Feedback Loops (FBL) are valuable for email senders and email service providers (ESPs). It provides valuable information on who is complaining about your mail. Not only does it (usually) allow you to unsubscribe people who complain, preventing them from lodging any addition…

Mailman is a very popular open source mailing list management software package. It's been around for a long time -- since the late 1990s, according to Wikipedia . Sites using Mailman to manage discussion lists were negatively impacted by the roll-out of DMARC, specifically …

Litmus recently shared news that is sure to make email designers everywhere light up with glee: "On August 31, 2016, Gmail began supporting the CSS property display: none;. And today, Gmail announced they will begin supporting <style> and media queries later this mon…

SendGrid's Paul Kincaid-Smith's has a post up this morning about the "tsunami of unwanted email" generated by the bad guys out there using botnets to subscription bomb (aka harass) people and why you should secure subscription signup forms. The bad news is, t…

This is pretty slick. When is the last time you selected "View Source" in Gmail to look at the raw headers and body content of an email message? As of a couple of days ago, Google has added some nice new info to this feature, showing an easy-to-understand summary of a…

Back in 2014, MailChimp published data showing what happens when you mail to purchased lists. Though it is now a couple of years old, it's still solid research and quite relevant today. MailChimp's John Foreman summarizes it thusly: If we look at campaign performance ve…

Microsoft recently announced that on November 1, 2016, they will stop generating updates for Microsoft Exchange's "SmartScreen" spam filters used in Microsoft Exchange Server and the Outlook (Windows) desktop client. Read more about it here . What does this mean? …

If you're having deliverability issues, I can tell you from my experience that you aren't really going to be able to get back to the inbox if any of the following types of subscriber list sources are in play: Co-registration or "lead generation." Every smart m…

Kayla Lewkowicz of Litmus breaks it down:  Seven common deliverability-related assumptions that just aren't true. She explains whether or not it's OK to use FREE in a subject line, or is Yahoo to blame when Yahoo blocks your mail, and provides even more solid explanati…

A representative of Facebook confirmed for me that the email service handling mail for facebook.com email addresses is no more. PC Mag  had previously shared that FB was warning users back in April that this was coming. Thus, it is now safe to block, reject, unsubscribe or othe…

In case you've been living under a rock, or you've been lucky enough to not be affected, here's the deal: Some bad guys, probably Russian or Eastern European, have decided to mail-bomb unsuspecting folks by signing them up for many hundreds or thousands of mailing l…

Since about 6:00 am eastern this morning, Thursday, August 25, Yahoo has been deferring delivery attempts from almost everyone ESP or mail platform I'm hearing from. My guess is that there's a spam filter update issue or system capacity issue over at Yahoo. As far as we…

Someone asked me the other day, where can they get a new IP address? Their current IP address is "blacklisted" at Yahoo and Hotmail, I was told. It's easy enough to get a new domain name, but what about the IP address? They let me know that their deliverability wa…

Google just announced that if a message received at Gmail cannot be authenticated by way of either DKIM or SPF, the user interface is going to show a question mark in place of the sender's avatar or logo. Click here to learn more .

Verizon announced today that they are buying (most of) Yahoo for 4.8 billion dollars in cash. Back in 2015, they purchased AOL for 4.4 billion dollars. This means that three different email receiving platforms are now owned by one entity: Verizon. It's hard to saay what b…

If you work the abuse desk for an email service provider, you've undoubtably gotten spam reports from angry Spamcop users who think that your ESP, your employer, is "refusing" Spamcop reports. Truth be told, Spamcop disallows reports to be sent to email service p…

Periodically I create a virgin Gmail account and sign it up for something, to see what other kind of stuff might end up in the inbox. On February 22, 2010, I clicked on a single "free ipad" co-reg marketing ad, and left the checkboxes checked. I watched the mail comin…

Word to the Wise's Laura Atkins is quoted in this article from Wired, " Mailchimp Sends a Billion Email a Day. That's the Easy Part ." It's not a bad primer on Email Reputation 101, and why you can't just shovel spam at ISPs and except them to take it.…

I've been asked this question pretty regularly: How do I tell the world that a certain domain of mine isn't valid for sending email? What about typo domains, bad domains? How can they configure things to tell the world that no legitimate mail should have this domain in …

It's been just over five years since a particular goober harvested his LinkedIn contact list and spammed me and a bunch of other folks. Consider that the next time it happened, with somebody else doing it, was just now, I guess that means that it's safe to say that not…

Various online sites are reporting that Apple's iOS operating system version 10 is going to add support for the list unsubscribe header found in many email messages. In case you're wondering, it does sound like this unsubscribe feature supports the "mailto" ve…

Another spammer put under the microscope! Brian Krebs reports on the FBI arrest of Michael A. Persaud , reported to be one of the world's top ten spammers.

Ah,  Sanford Wallace . 1990s spammer, widely blocked and blacklisted, one of a few big bad spammers who made the rest of us realize that spam was a real problem and that we had to do something about it. Way back in 1999, in a Usenet discussion thread about Sanford, one of my fe…

"Send to Dad by Sunday midnight!" the email's subject line exclaims. My father is currently in hospice care. He isn't reading a lot of emails. He probably doesn't need this valuable offer. This reminds me a lot of the multiple "Don't miss out on M…

I have never liked capitalizing internet or web, previous versions of the AP Stylebook be damned. I guess I'm some sort of trailblazer or something, because now my way is the right way, because  the latest version of the AP Stylebook says it is no longer appropriate to capi…

Word to the Wise's Laura Atkins, like me, often gets asked about words to avoid in subject lines. Is it OK to use the word "free" in a subject line? I read that causes spam filtering! Not true, Laura patiently explains . Like Laura, I've been trying to explain…

Want to spam everybody who signed up for emails from Wisconsin governor Scott Walker during his failed presidential bid? That'll cost you $10,500 . Makes me wish I had signed up for his email list, so I could see what kind of junk he's allowing people to send through to…

Somebody asked me recently, what is phishing? Instead of re-inventing the wheel, allow me to link to a few of the resources already out there that explain what phishing is and why it is a problem. What is phishing? From Wikipedia : "Phishing is the attempt to acquire sensi…

Yahoo and Gmail both hit the news this past weekend, and not for great reasons. If you're an American Yahoo! Mail user and you want to email your congressman, good luck with that. Congress is apparently blocking access to Yahoo! Mail, in an effort to reduce malware infectio…

Today's guest post comes from deliverability consultant extraordinaire, my friend Josie Garcia. Take it away, Josie! Did you know that senders are in control of many more reputation and vulnerability factors than ESPs? Your ESP is in control of things like setting up an abu…