Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

My wife and I were lucky enough to be able to purchase a new car earlier this year. It's a nice car and we love it. But ever since then, seemingly once a month or so, I get a survey request related to automobiles and the automotive industry. Some from known entities, some f…

First published in 2005 , the FCC's Wireless Domains list was intended to be a list of domains associated with mobile devices (cell phones, pagers, etc.) and that senders of commercial messages were to avoid those messages unless appropriate consent was obtained for each r…

Ever seen the @InterestingSBLs twitter account? It's kind of interesting and occasionally entertaining. It highlights various SBL entries that its anonymous author finds "interesting" by whatever criteria that may be. Because it's an ESP? An ESP's client? …

MailChimp's John Foreman explains the usual reasons why sending to purchased lists is a bad idea, but then he adds on one important practical fact: They perform very poorly. Click on over to the MailChimp blog to learn more .

From Brian Krebs: "The backdrop of the story is a long-running turf war between two of the largest sponsors of spam. A true-crime tale of political corruption and ill-fated alliances, tragedy, murder and betrayal, this book explains how the conditions that gave rise to thi…

Probably, implies Return Path based on a correlation between a typical Spamhaus blacklisting and drop in inbox delivery rates at Gmail. I think it's safe to assume that Google does use Spamhaus data for some sort of reputation calculation impacting Gmail deliverability.

A friendly representative of a company who helps small businesses sell products asked:  "We're having problems forwarding mail from our customers back to our users due to the new Yahoo and AOL restrictive DMARC policy . If we add a DMARC record for our own domain name,…

Smart web developer and systems admin Mike Cardwell put together something neat that I think you'll want to check out: Email Privacy Tester . Plug in your email address, and his system will send you an email message. That message will contain a whole bunch of different type…

DMARC (specifically, DMARC with a p=reject policy) does one thing: It makes it very difficult for somebody to use your domain in a from address without your permission. It doesn't stop spam from open relays, open proxies, snowshoeing network blocks, nor does it prevent peop…

Allow me to share with you my rough notes compiled during my recent configuration of email and DKIM on a new Ubuntu VPS installation. Hopefully these helpful hints will help the next poor soul trying to get DKIM up and running on the first try: SpamAssassin seems to want to fai…

If you've ever set up catch-all domain names, that accept mail destined to any address, or set up your MTA in a way where all mail is accepted before checking to see if the recipient is valid, then you've probably seen emails containing this quote: "It’s 106 miles …

A few weeks ago, somebody on the Mailop list asked about an email they received. Turns out, it was a Challenge/Response spam filter. You know, one of those emails from a robot that says "click here to prove you're not a robot, otherwise I'm not going to deliver you…

For my server running the discussion mailing lists that I host, I'm running OpenDKIM, OpenDMARC and Postfix on Ubuntu. I run a custom mailing list manager that I wrote myself; I keep telling myself that eventually I'll polish the code enough to share it with the world. …

What impact has Yahoo's new "p=reject" DMARC policy had on spam claiming to be from Yahoo.com? "DMARC has reduced spam purported to come from yahoo.com accounts by over 90%," says Alex Stamos, Yahoo's Vice President of Information Security, in his r…

Michael Adkins, Mail Integrity Engineer at Facebook summarizes it thusly : "STARTTLS encryption is widely supported and has achieved critical mass despite some issues with certificate management. A system deploying STARTTLS support for the first time can expect more than h…

As reported on the Mailop list today, Yahoo has modified their Yahoo Groups discussion group service to "play nice" with posts from subscribers at domains behind a restrictive DMARC policy. Google recently implemented very similar changes to its Google Groups servic…

Campaign Monitor's Andrew Bonar reports on the takeaways from a recent presentation  and Q&A session where Gmail's Sri Somanchi chatted with members of the ESPC (Email Sender and Provider Coalition).

That's a question I get asked from time to time, so I figured this would be a good place to link to numbers. As reported on CNET today : "The company said it has 110 [million] daily active email users, though that figure includes users on every device, including deskto…

Now that Yahoo and AOL have both implemented "p=reject" DMARC policies, Google has modified their Google Groups discussion group service to "play nice" with posts from subscribers at domains behind a restrictive DMARC policy. If Google took no action with r…

Today, AOL announced that they, too, have adopted a "p=reject" DMARC policy . The same considerations previously mentioned as applying to Yahoo Mail users now apply to AOL users as well. In today's AOL postmaster blog post , Vishwanath Subramanian offers some sol…

Surprise! Or was it? I've been warning for a while now that DMARC doesn't play nice with mailing lists . But really nobody, not even me, thought that a big ISP like Yahoo was going to publish a "p=reject" DMARC policy. Nonetheless, they did publish such a poli…

All this talk about Yahoo's recent DMARC policy change got a friend to ask me about her domain name and whether or not this change has any impact on her. Ellen asked me, "Does this mean anyone with a personal domain sending through an ISP who implements DMARC with a p…

Yesterday, Yahoo posted " an Update on our DMARC Policy to Protect Our Users ." They've also posted " Yahoo DMARC Policy Change - What Should Senders Do ." (H/T: WTTW )

How dare Yahoo update their DMARC policy without warning the internet community of the potential fallout from doing so. At least, that's what some other folks have said. My take on it is more prosaic. I figure it's your domain name, you're free to do whatever you w…

Yahoo's recent DMARC policy change didn't just break somebody's church list. It also caused problems for every single discussion group hosted by OnlineGroups.net . Chief Wrangler Dan Randow and his team didn't take that sitting down. They didn't cry, shake …

In the next chapter in the story of Yahoo's recent DMARC policy change , Andrew Barrett shares a snapshot of what percentage of an example email service provider's clients send mail via the ESP using a Yahoo.com from address.

Yahoo's recent DMARC policy changes have made it so that Yahoo subscribers will now have trouble participating in old fashioned LISTSERV-style discussion lists. When a Yahoo user posts to your discussion list, very few subscribers will receive that message, because any ISP …

A few days ago, Yahoo updated their DMARC policy setting to "p=reject." What this means is, mail containing a Yahoo from address is basically no longer considered legitimate if it doesn't contain an authentication signature or if it didn't come from properly i…

I have no problem helping a client address deliverability issues, even if their industry or politics encompass something I don't personally approve of.  My friend Mickey Chandler and I (who have very different political affiliations) have worked capably together to help ad…

The WHOIS process and protocol isn't just some nerd thing that goes back a hundred years; it's a valuable public directory for savvy internet users to be able to identify who owns a given domain nam e . Spam and security investigators find it a valuable tool -- even if…

The Apache Software Foundation just announced the release of SpamAssassin 3.4.0 via a message posted to the SpamAssassin announcements email list by project chair Kevin A. McGrail. Release notes menion that "this is a major release.  It introduces over two years of bug fix…

As reported over on the iDownload blog (and as mentioned to me by others), Gmail had a significant oops lately. Apparently, there was some system glitch that resulted in some actions (such as "delete" and "report spam" being applied to a message other than …

On January 9th, Google announced that your Google+ contacts (people in your G+ circles) will now automatically show up as contacts inside of Gmail. This isn't really a good thing, from my perspective. A lot of (OK, just about all of) my G+ connections are acquaintances or …