Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

Hey, Al! I was wondering if you could provide some guidance about SPF record format. Is it better to list the exact IP(s) in the SPF record? How about using the SPF dash (-all), or tilde (~all)? Which way is more common and better for deliverability? May, 2024 Update: My origin…

Over on the Kickbox blog , my colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz talks about sending domains and what you need to think about if you want to share domains between multiple email provider platforms. It's a common thing, right? You are probably using more than one service pro…

It's always good to hear about growth of the good kind of spam. Hormel seems to be doing very well during these crazy times. From CNBC : “That’s incredible. We’ve had to announce new capacity that we’re going to bring online in 2023 to meet the demand, so Spam is as strong…

Ask Al: We're a restaurant that just opened. We signed up for an email service provider (ESP) platform and we're looking to buy email lists to get started. Where should we start? Hey! Thanks for reaching out, but I wanted to warn you that email list purchasing isn't…

I had a customer ask me yesterday, why is their ESP trying to force them to implement CAPTCHA on their signup forms? They're not spammers. Well, unfortunately, it's usually because of stuff like this: As Webbula's Jenna Devinney explains , bad guys can easily find a…

SocketLabs’ Brian Godiksen and Campaign Monitor’s Travis Hazlewood joined forces in this excellent blog post to explain what can go wrong when you use a subdomain (under a domain you don't own) to send mail. Example? Some registrars offer up this goofy thing where you can …

I can't tell if this article from Joe Queenan for the Wall Street Journal (paywall; sorry) is a joke or not. Relevant excerpt: "Just one example [of legitimate email going to the spam folder]: In recent years, a great deal of criticism has been leveled at the Swedish …

Per notification on the Mailop mailing list on November 24, 2021, "Tucows / OpenSRS is executing an upgrade that will result in new SMTP outbound IP addresses being used within the next couple weeks.

Back in November, Spamhaus reported on how somebody managed to send a bunch of forged email through real FBI email servers . Brian Krebs broke down how it happened : The email registration process involves sending out a one-time use token sent by the web server in question, but…

Hey! I know that people find the ISP domain guides useful, so I thought I'd fire up the blog machine to share info about our friends at American telecommunications company Comcast (Xfinity) and their various email domains. I'm not sure that everybody knows this informa…

Editor's note: Spam Resource is more-or-less on a break this week, which makes for a great opportunity for me to share a guest post by John Peters, Deliverability Specialist for Campaign Monitor . Take it away, John! During the busy email season the global volume of emails …

You'll remember that recently I explained how 1Password now has its own "hide my email" feature (with a bit of help from Fastmail), for those who may not be into using the Apple version of the functionality. Well, Mozilla wants you to remember that they've g…

I hope everyone has a happy and safe Thanksgiving Holiday. Maybe you've got a long weekend ahead or perhaps you'll need to be up and ready to provide deliverability support for those Black Friday email campaigns. Either way, I hope things go smoothly and that you have a…

Validity's Mathieu Girol has announced that Telecom Italia will now be offering an ISP Feedback Loop through the Validity Universal FBL service . If you manage feedback loops for an ESP or email sending platform, you'll want to go sign up for this ASAP! The domains thi…

Katherine Skiba for AARP reports how in just one particular month in 2021, five hundred (!) different consumer brands were hit by phishing attacks -- not just Sam's Club! And phishing attacks and email scams are big money. "Though in third place, [the FTC says that] i…

Do you use Zimbra? Zimbra Collaboration, formerly known as the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) before 2019, is an open-source collaborative software suite that includes an email server and a web client. L. Mark Stone from Zimbra partner Mission Critical Email has put togethe…

From The DRIP : More great content from Lucy Mazalon . This time around, she details what Salesforce Pardot does to help users deal with non-human interactions, aka bot and security device clicks and activity. Metrics Guard and Visitor Filters being two key Pardot features that…

I've  blogged about using OpenDKIM with Postfix , having myself run the two together for a quite a number of years now. I've set up enough servers from scratch to have compiled my own setup guide. You'd find it cryptic and confusing, so I won't share it. But wha…

From our friends at Spamhaus via Twitter today (Saturday, November 13th), here's a warning about fraudulent US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) emails that are sending from IP addresses actually used by the FBI. "We have been made aware of "scary" email…

I'm saddened to find that pumpkin spice spam didn't seem to be available this year, but if you're looking for a spammy meal in the spirit of the season, this recipe from Caroline Choe of the Today show might just do the trick . Cornbread Dressing with Spam and Sun-D…

The end of an era! Do you remember your first BlackBerry? I sure do, that big blue blob of a device with a fantastic keyboard and SSH that worked inside the work firewall (shh, don't tell anyone) and was so easily integrated into work email that it hurt. (Sorry, T-Mobile S…

Hey, if you're wondering who the heck I am, the fine folks at Kickbox just published a Q&A between myself and my new (to me) colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz. Click on over to the Kickbox blog to check it out .  And if you're a weirdo who likes time travel, below th…

DMARC is not a magic bullet that shoots your mail straight to the inbox. But it does two things well and these two things are (or should be) important to email senders, marketers and IT professionals alike: It allows you to monitor for email authentication failures and complian…

Yahoo announced a shutdown of Yahoo Mail in China (yahoo.com.cn and yahoo.cn) to take place back in 2015. In 2019, the domains seemed to be resurrected , but they’ve since gone dead again, as the MX records for each domain point at nothing. And since Yahoo just announced th…

You'll recall me warning recently that using Spamhaus data to protect your mail server is a bad idea if you're using open or public DNS resolvers . TL;DR? Spamhaus is worried about too much traffic via public channels but blocking is implemented in a way that makes it …

How do I use OpenDKIM with multiple domain names on a single postfix server? That's a question I myself had when I first set up my current VPS to host my current email system. So I searched around a bit. I found  this guide , but it's kind of a pain in the rear. Too muc…

Looking for guidance on how to create your BIMI logo file? Valimail has a pretty good guide that explains the requirements and they also explain what to keep in mind when creating your BIMI graphic SVG file. Starting with:

I've got just enough time for a quick post today, to share with you this very useful DMARC Dictionary put together by the fine folks at dmarcian . Check it out ! And since that would make for a very short blog post, here's four bonus online resources that you might als…

Having trouble sending mail to mail.mil? You're not alone. One of their three authoritative DNS servers (sdns3.csd.disa.mil) for the domain mail.mil appears to be unreachable right now. Confirm for yourself here . If you use public DNS, results are mixed . My testing shows …

Is this every possible blog post or FAQ page explaining Apple's MPP changes aka the death of open tracking? No, probably not. But here's a bunch. Some I found myself, others were shared with me by many kind folks in the deliverability space. If you want to work your way…

American multinational telecommunications conglomerate Comcast , most well-known to us Internet users here in the US as the provider of cable modem-based internet service Xfinity, has announced that they'll be sending outbound mail from subscribers via new (additional) IP a…

You did it! You got Yahoo or Microsoft to unblock you. Perhaps you even figured out why they "hate" you . Perhaps your friendly neighborhood deliverability consultant just closed the ticket you submitted, letting you know that the ISP has unblocked your sending IP a…

The good people at email platform provider Fastmail (whom I've blogged about more than once previously ) are dealing with a distributed denial-of-service ( DDOS ) attack. Not fun. I feel for them. From Twitter :  Over the last two days, service has been interrupted sever…

This isn't the first time I've blogged about vegan SPAM , which is a sentence I never thought I would write. But here we are, and it's making my brain hurt. From VegNews: "Hormel Foods Corporation—known best for its canned meat product SPAM—is developing new p…

CM Group has announced a merger with email service provider/customer engagement platform Cheetah Digital (aka CheetahMail, once upon a time owned by Experian , later spun out standalone, with leadership and a lot of higher-level positions more recently filled by ex-ExactTarget …

From Spamhaus: Here's a bonkers tale about a spamming doorbell. Oof, crappy "internet of things" devices are a scourge unto the internet. Alex Grosjean shares this very interesting story of tracking down where the spam was coming from on a home broadband subscribe…

Do you use any of the Spamhaus blocking lists (DNSBLs) to protect yourself from inbound spam and email threats? If so, you're not alone. The Spamhaus data is quite popular and used by many ISPs as a front door gatekeeper for IP (and domain) reputation.

Multiple sources are reporting that Google Postmaster Tools (GPT) has returned. I've confirmed it myself; graphs and data are back. As previously mentioned , Google Postmaster Tools went down around October 4th (and DMARC reports ceased to be sent, around the same time). I…

If you subscribe to Spam Resource via email, thank you! No matter how you choose to consume this content, I appreciate you. But the email subscribers are helping me keep my skills sharp, allowing me to build and run my own mailing list manager software, and write my own automa…

Lucy Mazalon from THE DRIP recently explained the good marketing reasons that would drive you to want to implement a winback campaign :  "Marketing considered these leads qualified once, and sales even progressed the conversations. You could say they are the “low hanging f…

Just recently, I shared my top five (plus) tips on how to be prepared to maximize deliverability success this holiday season. It's a starting point, and I hope you found it useful! But what if we take that to the next level? And by "we," I mean not me. Somebody e…

Here's one I almost missed, from a couple of weeks ago: According to Wired, Cloudflare is moving into the email security space . The goal? To better protect against email-delivered threats (think phishing). They see a gap there; one I've noticed myself.

I've received multiple reports from different folks that Google Postmaster Tools (GPT) and Google's DMARC reporting have both been offline since sometime around October 4th. GPT is still accessible but has no data later than 10/3, and for those used to receiving DMARC …

Remember EML files? I do. Back in the day (we’re talking the late 1990s here), Microsoft’s Outlook Express email client for Windows seemed to be the primary place where EML files came from -- and might even have originated the format . Then the new millennium happened, we move…

Don't just take my word for it! I like to check in with other smart folks from time to time and see what they have to say about email deliverability. This time around, I recommend checking out this recent article from iPost's Andrew Kordek, where he shares five solid ti…

Is it on topic for my blog? Maybe not, but it has come up in conversation enough times already that I think people are interested about it. So here's a quick bunch of links for you, in case you're curious and would like to learn more. As you may or may not have noticed …

"It’s like Apple’s new Hide My Email feature, but it works everywhere," according to The Verge . And it's powered by email platform Fastmail , perhaps a bit of a niche provider, but I mean that in a good way. Founded in 1999 , Fastmail hast a long history in the e…

While all the talk of what's slick and hot and next seems to focus on adding AI to this and building the blockchain version of that, it still sounds to me like email is where the money is. Am I crazy to think that? And of course, multi-channel matters, but that means having…

It’s pumpkin spice season! Can you feel the chill in the air? Me, neither -- today’s projected high temperature is 77 degrees (F) here in my adopted hometown of Chicago. Nonetheless, now is when savvy email marketers should be preparing for deliverability success ahead of the …