Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

Not like this. I'm not quite sure who Wonderland Collective are, but when somebody asked them why they are sending unsolicited email, they decided to complain back , instead of apologizing. But wait, there's more! Be sure to read the whole thread . I sort of assum…

Here's " 4 holiday deliverability tips to get your emails delivered every time " from Sam McNeil from WhatCounts. Solid advice. Allow me to add a fifth: Now is not the time to experiment. Don't dig out that old list, triple your volume or decide to warm up a…

What was the most common term in spam in the run-up to the mid-term elections? "Trump," says Proofpoint .

Whoops! Email launch error. Wrong content? Wrong list? Broken images? Exposed mail merge variables? What do you do? Litmus's Chad White helps you break it down with a series of simple questions.

From Dot Magazine: Email has been around a long time now, but it’s still got a lot of life left in it. Marcel Becker from Oath explains how email will evolve in the future . (Oath, if you don't recall, is the company managing the AOL and Yahoo Mail platforms.) H/T: Anth…

Back in 2016 I pointed out that Sender ID no longer matters . It's still true today! Indeed, the RFCs for Sender ID are being moved to "historic" status  -- indicating it's not an active standard.

Recently I talked about how to make your brand image icon show up when sending to Gmail recipients. Today I'll talk about how to do the same for a different set of smaller ISPs and email clients. Gravatar is a system owned by the folks behind Wordpress that allows you t…

Looking to make your brand's logo show up next to emails you send to Gmail recipients, but you're not sending from a Gmail account? I think I've figured out how you can do that. Read on. First off, to "radio futurologist" James Cridland for his article on …

Do you use Inbox by Gmail ? If so, you've got until March 2019 to enjoy it before it shuts down . H/T Delivery Counts .

Spam levels are down a bit, according to various reports . Is GDPR to thank? Truth be told, Spamhaus says, that GDPR actions taken by legitimate companies sending legitimate mail might have reduced the amount of mail they send, wanted or unwanted, but those companies weren'…

A re-engagement campaign is where you beef up your subscriber engagement (the open/read/click percentages in a sender's stats) by asking existing subscribers to click on a link to show that they're still alive, often followed by retiring/suppressing addresses who don…

Well, it looks as though we haven't solved the Scunthorpe Problem just yet, according to Natalie Weiner, whose last name still gets blocked by filters. Read more about it over on Slashdot . Gotta love content filtering. Previously .

Mapp Digital Senior Deliverability Specialist Tom Ellengold has posted a brief, but useful, overview of the list bombing issue faced by so many senders and email service providers of late. If you're not familiar with the issue, it's definitely worth a read.

Since I last posted, my new address sample2018box@gmail.com has received 105 different emails from 80+ different senders. Thank you for your help signing it up to email lists, and feel free to sign it up for more! I tried to sign up some myself. I had trouble with a few attem…

Hey there! Want to help me with a fun project? Sure you do! I'm tracking different emails from different brands, senders, companies, and email services providers. Want to help give me more samples to play with? Just add my new special address sample2018box@gmail.com to …

Gmail warned us that a more restrictive DMARC policy was coming, didn't they? That warning came all the way back in 2015 . They said that "p=reject" was coming. Maybe it still is -- we're not there yet, but this appears to be a step in the right direction. T…

Email deliverability monitoring firm 250ok just released "the 250ok Deliverability Guide" and it provides a solid getting started point for the concepts behind deliverability, email authentication, sending reputation and best practices. It's a free download and yo…

If you monitor these things, you might have noticed that Apple's consumer email domains (iCloud domains) -- mac.com, me.com and icloud.com -- have moved to a "p=quarantine" DMARC policy . This means that if you have an email address in these domains, your ability…

Did you know that UK Retailer Tesco offered email service? Me neither, but I'm not their target demographic. I assume they did or do offer internet service and that the email service perhaps went along with that. Anyway, as of June 27, 2018, the email service at tesco.net…

This Wall Street Journal article points out that "disconnecting" from your always-connected online life when you want to go on vacation would be a whole lot better if SMS had an "away" message feature (as they called it in AOL Instant Messenger and Internet…

If you manage ISP Feedback Loop (FBL) subscriptions for a set of sending IP addresses, you'll like this. Return Path just launched what they call a "Universal FBL," an ISP Feedback Loop signup and management process that encompasses almost every single ISP FBL k…

The news is so chock full of horrible stuff lately that you might be struggling to look for something positive to celebrate this Independence Day. I know I am. Spam to the rescue! America's favorite canned meat turns 82 years old just one day later, on July 5th. Read how it…

Since I've enabled a "reject" DMARC policy on my domains, I've been reviewing the various failure reports that come in to see what crazy spam those crazy spammers might try to send. Amazingly, they are willing to try to send some really bad stuff to see if it …

Mashable's Chris Taylor talks about the problem of misdirected emails . A good read and it helps to expose a real issue that I don't think many people stop and consider. I'll add my own questions here. What if, because of this, a sender is exposing PII (personally…

I've long had a little banner at the bottom of my xnnd.com DNS tools site that says "since 2008" but it looks like I'm going to have to change that. Looking through my notes, the site actually launched eleven years ago today! XNND exists because back then t…

Remember this blast from the past? Back in 2007, email expert John Levine sat down with Canada's CBC News to be interviewed for what became "Spam, the Documentary." It wasn't widely available in the US then, but appears to be viewable on YouTube right now. …

How do I keep my email messages out of Gmail's Promotional tab? This is a common question lately. Is there one common answer? Ask six different people, and you'll get six different answers. And I'm not sure which answer is the best one, so I'll collect them here…

Here's the updated DOOM WARNING that appears on a suspicious message in the new Gmail user interface. But why, I ask, would it appear on this particular message that I received? The message in question fully authenticates, it was sent from a reputable ISP, and it was an em…

Here's a neat DMARC trick that I would have implemented sooner, had I read MAAWG's " Best Practices for Parked Domains " document a little closer back when it came out back in late 2015. But back then, I wasn't as DMARC savvy as I was now. Anyway, the tr…

Multiple folks reached out to me overnight to let me know that the SpamCannibal DNSBL has blown up, that they have effectively "listed the world," resulting in mail admins blocking all mail if they use this DNSBL in their mail server configuration . I talked to the o…

Remember how Outlook had that horrible "Recall" function that didn't work because anybody with a brain could just force quit Outlook to prevent it from deleting the original message? This has nothing to do with that. If you still use Outlook (I don't) and if t…

Looks like the anti-spam blacklist at dnsbl.cyberlogic.net has listed the entire world. More info can be found here .

And that's not even all of them.

As AOL and Yahoo continue their transition into one platform, things were bound to change over time. As a result of this ongoing consolidation, AOL no longer offers whitelisting of sending IP addresses. Though the form still seems to be up at the moment, any submissions seem to…

As mentioned on Slashdot, TechCrunch is reporting that unsubscription service Unroll.me is saying that EU users are no longer welcome, claiming that it's not possible to comply with GDPR.

Even though the Vodafone Ireland domain vodafone.ie has six active MX records , this appears to be a dead email domain, and I suggest you suppress all vodafone.ie addresses from any email lists. Vodafone appears to have announced this closure in 2014. The original announcemen…

What are Apple's email domains, in case you were wondering? For end consumers, customers who have registered for Apple IDs and/or email accounts, those domains are: mac.com me.com icloud.com Apple says :  If you created an iCloud account on or after September 19, 2012…

Remember Lycos Mail ? No? Then you're probably under 40 years old. What I didn't remember is that it still existed. But while it shall continue to exist, current users enjoying email service from Lycos Mail for free are being asked to leave as of May 15, 2018. It's …

"9 to 5 Google" reports on a new spam run that seems to have found and exploited some sort of loophole in Gmail spam filtering . Anybody else get hit with this? I did; starting last night, I got upwards of 40+ spams like this, falsely purporting to be from me, sending…

Recognizing the upcoming 40th anniversary of spam (the bad kind), Forbes shares 25 facts you may or may not have known about everybody's least favorite kind of email messages. There's a couple of nits possibly worth picking there for accuracy's sake, but it's m…

Cloudflare just launched their own public DNS service . To try it, simply configure your computer to use the DNS servers 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 . Then your computer's DNS lookups (the internet's mapping of domain names to IP addresses) will route through Cloudflare instea…

Did you use goo.gl to shorten links in email newsletters or text versions of emails? Looks like the ability to do that is going away . Doesn't every ESP or email platform have its own click tracking or URL rewriting mechanism by now? And using third party URL shorteners has…

Google's "ReCAPTCHA" API-based user validation process is very popular. So popular, that internet users are running into warnings here and there on the web, suggesting that it's about to stop working on some websites. The reason? The V1 version is deprecated…

Did you know? Gmail actually has two domains. They are gmail.com and googlemail.com. The latter was used primarily in Germany from the launch of Gmail up through some time in 2012. At first, the Gmail trademark was taken by somebody else in Germany . Looks like it may have also…

I've started to search for and catalog big brand DMARC records to look for ideas and suggestions, and also to develop some best practice recommendations. One thing I'm seeing quite often is that a big company will put "p=reject" and "sp=reject" in …

Matt Vernhout of deliverability monitoring service provider 250ok reports that US colleges are slow to adopt DMARC . I'm not totally surprised; my personal observation is that the financial sector and top tier ISPs/webmail providers seem to be leading the DMARC charge. But …

A bunch of friends have been forwarding around this link to an article from "EContent" entitled " Research Finds Email Senders with Strong Subscriber Engagement Are Likely to See Less Email Delivered to Spam " On one level, duh. But also, on another leve…

I have a few Gmail accounts set up where I programmatically download all the mail so that I can generate a report showing information about each message. Sometimes, some of the email messages I receive and want to report on go to the spam folder. I could download mail from the …

I'm curious to dig into the methodology here to look for limitations, but so far so good. Money reports on a recent study to compare spam identifying/blocking functionality of the top four US cell carriers. T-Mobile came out on top as far as identifying or blocking Scam/Fr…