An updated version of this guide can be found here .
Once called Verizon Media Group, but now back to the more familiar name of Yahoo Inc. , you might know them as internet service providers AOL, Yahoo and Verizon. The email platform they all utilize now is, from a sender's perspective, Yahoo! Mail. Here are my five top recom…
I hope everybody survived Black Friday and Cyber Monday! It's still a busy week but when you've got things under control, why not take a break and spend it reading about how the military made Spam (the food) an iconic American brand , courtesy of Navy Times.
As a follow up to my previous post on domain name choice best practices , here's an additional two cents I wanted to share. Because I get this question all the time -- should I use my ".com" domain for my email program? Or should I register a ".email" do…
Sometimes those of us with a quite-possibly-myopic worldview might assume that outside of North America and Europe, spam regulation doesn't exist. Well, here's an example where Egypt's National Telecom Regulatory Authority filed a complaint against an insecticide c…
The folks behind Yahoo Groups sent out a notice a couple of days ago indicating that they are making changes to Yahoo Groups. They say that these changes are to make Yahoo Groups more email-oriented by removing the ability to participate in Yahoo Groups discussions on the web…
Not that kind--the other kind! From Minneapolis-St. Paul Magazine: Trendy chefs are celebrating SPAM coast-to-coast, and they’re leaving us in the dust. Chicken-fried spam tacos? I want to try those!
Sure! It's legal. Is it wise? Um....let's skip that point for a moment. Let's start with, "it's legal!" What does "FOIA" mean in this context? Wikipedia to the rescue: The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 5 U.S.C. § 552, is a federal…
Tulsi Gabbard's presidential campaign is suing Google for various reasons, primarily for suspending her Google Adwords account. Not really email related, so not really my realm to cover. But something did catch my eye when Laura Atkins blogged about it last week on Word to…
If you're going to use your domain (or a custom domain) with an email platform, try, if at all possible, to use your main domain name. Here's why I say that. Let's pretend I'm a large multi-national corporation called Al Iverson. I own aliverson.com. Nobody e…
Another anti-spam blacklist has ceased to exist. For more on the now-defunct Email Basura blacklist, head over to DNSBL Resource .
I've updated the XNND DNS lookup tool so that it you can now select "Multi DNS = yes" and the tool will now make the same DNS query against a number of different public DNS servers all in a row. It'll help you catch issues where you've perhaps updated a …
Gossip has been flowing through the back channels lately suggesting that Microsoft might be checking Sender ID email authentication DNS records anew. No...but. My answer to this is a little nuanced, so bear with me. Not true: "Sender ID never really died, they're s…
It appears that the email domain ono.com is going away. ONO was a Spanish broadband communication and entertainment company, purchased by Vodafone in 2014. Fast forward to 2019, and it looks like Vodafone is shutting down the ono.com email domain. Vodafone has published a page …
Email Compliance manager Skyler Holobach explains why you shouldn't act on clickbait advice you find on the internet. Read more >>
I'm pulling together information from various sources here, and using a bit of guesswork. So keep in mind that this info is not guaranteed. When sending mail to Charter/TWC/RoadRunner domains ( full list here ), are you seeing any of these bounces? 550 5.1.0 sender reje…
This is pretty basic stuff; it's not inaccurate, but it's not complete. Most other ISPs have other things going on that can also result in emails going to the spam folder. But as a starting point? It's not too bad. Check it out, from NBC: How Email Spam Filters Work…
Wondering what different kind of bounces an ISP might give to you? Postmark put together this handy-dandy SMTP bounce example lookup tool. It's called the SMTP Field Manual and it's pretty neat.
Speaking of Spamhaus, this just popped up in my RSS feed reader. It looks like Spamhaus is going to take a harder stance against users who query their lists via open or public DNS systems (such as Google Public DNS or Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 Service). They're going to r…
You hear stories sometimes. About how when a deliverability person warns sales that they shouldn't sign that client, but the client comes aboard anyway. "If they do bad things, so what? It shouldn't impact other clients. We'll give them their own domain, their …
Is buying an email list a good idea? Let's ask around. Hubspot's got the best quick summary, in my opinion. They say buying an email is a bad idea because: Reputable email marketing services don't let you send emails to lists you've bought. Good email …
If you've previously seen this bounce message: 5.7.606 Access denied, banned sending IP [1.2.3.4]. To request removal from this list please visit https://sender.office.com/ and follow the directions. For more information please go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID…
If you're wondering if AOL still exists as a separate entity, the answer is no. AOL as a standalone ISP is no more. What was AOL is now part of Verizon Media Group, which for a time was called Oath . AOL, Yahoo and Verizon are all one mailbox provider, from a sender's…
If you have implemented DMARC for your email sending domain, the spec requires that your messages either pass "SPF alignment" or "DKIM alignment." Here's what those are and why they are important (and why you should always do both). SPF alignment is wh…
Engadget asks, " Did AI kill off spam and we just didn’t notice? " I'm not sure about THAT, but this article is still a very interesting read, and a good overview of how CAN-SPAM isn't considered a great law, how e-postage went nowhere ( in spite of Bill Gat…
Since lots of folks are reaching out to me, asking for help with BIMI records and/or wondering if it's something they should take the time to implement, I figured I would take a few minutes to explain the current state-of-the-state with regard to BIMI, and help to answer th…
Here's a not totally bad guide from ARS Technica on how to read email headers. It's worth reading (and bookmarking for future reference.)
It looks like Gmail will have support for BIMI! As announced by Agari, Google will be running a BIMI pilot program soon. Read all about it here . If you didn't already know, BIMI is meant to be a simple method for a brand or domain owner to publish a logo that is meant t…
Are you struggling with how to improve your sending reputation in Google Postmaster Tools? 250ok's LoriBeth Blair just published a very insightful blog post on this very topic.
Trying to publish a BIMI record? Wondering if you've done it correctly? Mailkit has this cool new tool in beta that will help you check and validate your BIMI record. Check it out!
Verizon Media (aka Oath, aka Yahoo & AOL) folks report that the merger of the AOL user base into the Yahoo Mail infrastructure is complete! Congrats! I'm sure it was a long, hard road. The bad way to do this would have been to keep the AOL accounts alive on some old,…
Gmail just turned 15 years old! Hard to believe that when it was announced on April 1, 2004, some people actually thought it was an April Fools' joke . And now? Gmail's pretty much in charge of email. Don't count out Microsoft and Verizon (Yahoo), but most B2C sen…
AMP (short for “Accelerated Mobile Pages") is a method to place dynamic content in email messages, announced by Google , now supported in Gmail , and with Verizon (AOL/Yahoo) now announcing support for it . What is it? Should you care? Want to learn more about it? Lifehack…
Savvy deliverability expert Karen Balle answers a common but important question: How do I avoid the spam filter ? And follows it up with a spot-on 6-Step Plan to Escape the Spam Folder .
Verizon Media (previously known as OATH, previously known as Yahoo, previously known as AOL) has just launched their new Postmaster Site . Check it out! As announced on their Postmaster Blog by Lead Postmaster Lili Crowley . I think it's fair to assume that the legacy …
Sometimes you get tired of working on email spam and just want to go out to dinner. To eat ... spam? Read about spam musubi and more courtesy of the Washington Post .
Today, Gizmodo explains how to train Gmail, Outlook/Windows Mail, and Apple Mail on what shouldn't be considered spam. They left out filter rules in Gmail -- it's pretty easy to create a filter rule in Gmail where the action is "never send to spam" -- this …
Over on the Mailop list (ignore the SSL warning, that is a long-standing issue), people are noting that Google Postmaster Tools has been missing data and/or been glitchy and/or disallowing new domain registrations over the past days. If you had trouble before, you might want t…
Look at the explosive growth of DMARC implementations! This is great to see. Read more about it over on dmarc.org .
If, like me, you use Gmail to test and check email authentication results, then you're used to seeing SPF results that say pass or fail. But what does it mean when it says "best guess"? Here's an example of a Gmail SPF results header that mentions "best…
Google just announced today how they've improved spam filtering using TensorFlow . What's TensorFlow, you might ask? "An open-source machine learning (ML) framework developed at Google. These new protections complement existing ML and rules-based protections, and…
Just over a year ago I predicted that 2018 would be a year full of mailbox provider consolidation, many folks implementing DMARC, and ISP filtering getting more tougher than ever. Was I right? It sure sounds a lot like what I worked on much of the time last year. Is it too g…
Remember back in September when I blogged about how to create a Google+ account to make your brand icon display next to your emails when sending to Gmail users? Well, looks like that won't work after a certain point, as Google is shutting down Google+ and will be dele…
I just replied to an email from a guy who thinks I'm blocking his mail. I'm not, because I don't run a blacklist or a spam filter, and haven't done so for years. I would have loved to have helped guide him in the right direction, but my reply to him bounced beca…
Need a "common sense" breakdown showing you what characters should be allowed in the username part (local part) of an email address? This handy guide from Jochen Topf covers exactly that. It doesn't EXACTLY align with RFCs, but when you look at it from a common …
