As the annus horribilis that is 2020 comes to a close, allow me to share the top five most popular Spam Resource posts from this year. Without further ado, they are:
Google's Gmail platform appears to have been throwing intermittent false "user unknown" bounces for just about the past 24 hours. The raw bounce would suggest that an address does not exist, when it does actually exist. Example:
Millions of inappropriate and racist spam emails sent to Seminole County middle school, high school students
From WFTV: "Seminole County Public Schools officials said they are trying to figure out how millions of inappropriate emails were sent to students. [...] One email starts off with a racial slur, features a photo of President Donald Trump and has a heading that talks about …
Validity's Guy Hanson recently posted an excellent overview of " How to Please Gmail " over on the Validity blog. It's good guidance--not entirely dissimilar to the Gmail guidance I myself provide here on Spam Resource . I like to share this to show that diffe…
Email developer Andris Reinman has created a cool email authentication library for Node.js that'll help you check a whole bunch of stuff relating to different email authentication bits. And it allows you to test things that might not have been so easy to test previously (li…
Return Path (now Validity ) manages a number of ISP feedback loops for ISPs all around the world. They've got a signup and management interface for this "Universal Feedback Loop Service" at fbl.returnpath.net . They have just announced that they've added Swiss…
Per notification on the Mailop mailing list, Vodafone Germany (the German subsidiary of the global telecoms provider Vodafone) is bringing live new email sending infrastructure. Vodafone Germany hosts mail for the following domains: arcor.de, arcormail.de, germanynet.de, gno.…
Yes, some people do it, and yes, for some people, it works fine. But..... If you're standing up a new server and it has an IPv6 IP address, and it has no sending reputation, you'll find it very hard to get mail reliably delivered to Gmail inboxes. You're starting wi…
John Jetmore has updated his super cool "email swiss army knife" tool, Swaks . It now comes with .netrc support (that's a file where you can store login credentials; used by tools like ftp and curl). There's also support for TLS SNI , and it will warn you if d…
Gmail just announced that they're about to offer up the ability to disable personalization of various features across their web apps. It appears to allow users to reclaim a measure of privacy by telling Google not to parse certain messages or content. Senders take note: the…
Brian Krebs reports on the identification of the body of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, "a prolific spammer and neo-Nazi," and adds that "It might be difficult to fathom why, but Hawke may have made a few enemies over the years." Read the article and you'll see…
If you don't remember, AMP for Email provides the ability to utilize dynamic content functionality in the email inbox. Bounteous explains : "With AMP, functionality previously relegated to landing pages (such as booking an appointment or even making a purchase) became …
Congrats, Atlanta! You're #1 in ... Business Email Compromise fraud. Andy Peters of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explains : "Atlanta has earned a dubious title in the cybercrime world — it’s the No. 1 location in the U.S. for criminals who target business owners, a…
2020 has been a hell of a year so far, hasn't it? The COVID-19 pandemic, medical (physical and mental) health challenges, working from home, economic issues and more. And there are email challenges to boot. When the COVID-19 crisis landed, every company you've ever hear…
Hey, maybe it's a bit "inside baseball," but I find it pretty interesting to learn about spammers targeting patent applicants with scam emails , courtesy of Tim Lince from World Trademark Review.
This is a real bummer. CNN reports that COVID-19 contact tracing efforts are being hindered by non-specific Caller ID and that some folks being called believe the calls are scams trying to phish personal information out of them. And what about people like me, that block calls …
Spamtraps are special types of email addresses. There are varying definitions, but the two most common types are email addresses that were never valid that get spam (usually typos), and recycled email addresses that still get spam long after being abandoned by the user. Anti-sp…
Giang Thi Huong Tran of Tilleke & Gibbins explains updated spam laws in Vietnam over on Lexology: "On August 14, 2020, the government of Vietnam issued Decree 91/2020/ND-CP on fighting against spam text messages, spam email, and spam calls. The new decree will take ef…
With a bit of help from an online tutorial , I've figured out how to relay outbound mail through Gmail. (Of course, that means that I'm sending mail out through a specific Gmail account, not just randomly relaying a bunch of mail through Gmail as if it were an open rela…
Sales of Hormel's deliciously salty SPAM are up in the US during this challenging time, thanks to thrifty shoppers like you and me. Are you running out of ideas of how to cook your spam? Fox Chapel Publishing has got you covered with the new Ultimate SPAM Cookbook . Miriam …
Once upon a time I asked if AMP dynamic content functionality was going to be " the next big thing " as far as email is concerned. Google's got support for it in Gmail , and Verizon announced future support for it in Yahoo Mail , but it looks like Microsoft is wal…
Today's guest post comes from Travis Murray. Travis is a Deliverability Engineer based in Canada. He has spent the last five years guiding clients and helping his peers with their deliverability concerns. You can connect with him on Linkedin or contact him via email . The…
Do you know about Swaks? Maybe not! It is perhaps not very widely known, but it is an amazingly useful tool. Swaks , created and maintained by John Jetmore , is billed as a "Swiss Army Knife for SMTP" and that's an apt description. What is it? It's an SMTP tes…
IP warming is the process by which, when you start sending from a mail server on a new IP address, you build up a good sending reputation by limiting your sending to small amounts of mail at first, and you gradually grow your sending volume over the first few weeks. You do that…
Engadget says that Edison Software's new email service OnMail has "two headline features ... 'accept sender' and anti-tracking technology." Sounds like another HEY-like email service to me, blocking tracking pixels and asking you who to allow in to the …
Direct Deliverability's Karen Balle has excellent advice for those trying to fix deliverability issues. Her quick tip helps you quickly boost engagement (and thus reputation), giving you time to dig deeper into the underlying issues. Allowing you to basically keep the ligh…
Lauren Meyer from Kickbox has put together this extremely informative and detailed feedback from ten different deliverability experts on how Gmail tabs affect senders and what senders should think about and do about them. It's a must read! Click here . So much good guidanc…
A simple tip for you today: If you ever switch up your email address, especially if you decide to change which service you use for your personal email inbox, you might want to configure things so that mail sent to your old email address is forwarded to your new email address au…
If you need simple DNSBL blocking list (or blacklist) tracking, here's a couple of services that both seem to work well: Debouncer and RBL Tracker . Both are free if monitoring only a single IP address. For Debouncer, you can monitor up to ten IP addresses at an 8 hour int…
DKIM ( DomainKeys Identified Mail ) is a great process for authenticating email messages. It uses a public-private key pair to cryptographically sign an email message to ensure that it was not modified in transit and that it actually originated from somebody associated with the…
Every email server has an IP address. It's sort of like the phone number for a server. It's often a stable identifier. Each IP address traces back to a company who owns a particular "network" or "block" of IP addresses. The IP address likely also ref…
Keep in mind that Microsoft has two separate mail systems: OLC (Outlook Consumer) which you might call Hotmail, and corporate mail hosting, the mail systems associated with their Office 365 service. The two systems have separate processes with regard to requesting to be unblock…
I don't think there's actually a conspiracy to block the political email messages of any certain party. I see no clear data suggesting political bias in spam filtering decisions. So where did this idea come from? Representative Greg Steube (R-Florida) complained to Goog…
Check out this list of top ten email/security blogs from November 2010. You know which URLs still resolve? Which ones are clearly still here? Only three of the ten.* Me! Al Iverson, Spam Resource . Laura Atkins, Word to the Wise . Mickey Chandler, Spamtacular . All three of us…
