Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

Evan writes,  "Hi Al, My email address has just been compromised and now I am receiving hundreds of System Administrator and Mail delivery failure notices sent to my inbox from all those poor people who have received unwanted spam from my address. I noticed your name on th…

Hey, just a quick reminder that I compile my Spam Resource blog content into a weekly email newsletter that sends out every Monday morning. Each week it contains highlights from the past week of posts, and an article or two from the twenty years of archives I've got up in h…

I think Verizon Wireless has supported reporting SMS spam to them via the 7726 (SPAM) SMS number for a while now. I'm not really sure when that started, but very recently, Verizon's Alex Lawson posted a blog post talking about 7726. Check it out here . TL;DR? Forward un…

I saw somebody ask recently how best to label their email marketing messages as an advertisement. Their intent was to comply with CAN-SPAM, the US federal anti-spam law. Though I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, allow me to clarify it with my layman's pants on,…

Anti-spammers and deliverability folks might think of this as a Permission Pass email. And indeed, Spamhaus has a whole guide describing how they think you should do it properly. But in addition to confirming and cleaning up certain types of problematic email lists, an email m…

Yahoo (as far as Yahoo Mail is concerned) was once called Yahoo, then it absorbed AOL and became Oath, then Verizon Media, and now it is just called Yahoo again . Throughout this time there has been some form of ISP feedback loop -- you know, that thing that sends complaint re…

If you monitor ISP feedback loop complaints, you may have noticed that the level of spam complaints received was greatly reduced over the weekend, as it appears that the Validity-run Universal FBL system seems to have stopped sending feedback loop complaint reports at some poin…

The intent behind DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) is to give a domain owner insight into who is sending mail using their domain and allow that domain owner to define a policy to tell ISPs what to do with mail that purports to be from them…

Yum! From the Daily Herald of Everett Washington, I share with you a wonderful recipe from Taylor Goebel that will allow you to make make cheesy little SPAM sandwiches, suitable for a snack or party appetizer. These "Thursday Night Sandwiches" sound simple to make but…

What is COI/DOI? It's just address validation and permission verification -- you send a welcome or verification message and the recipient has to click on a link to prove they want the subscription. And it's not a new thing, here's me talking about it  on this very b…

Diego asks, "I want to find out from you if their is a script or software that one can use for warming up an IP. I will buy even if it's not free." Not only did Diego just write in with this question, but this topic came up when chatting with a potential client a…

Join us on April 4th, in a webinar put together by the Certified Senders Alliance : With an ever-changing #email environment and recent developments around privacy and security in the email space, it is worth taking a closer look at which insights and data are key for email per…

Via the BBC comes the story of how a Norwegian computer expert has set up a website to allow people to mail random Russians to tell the story of the Ukraine war from a perspective not being covered in the Russian media. The website allows users to receive a random sampling of …

Over on his blog, John Levine explains why we couldn't just delete all .ru domains  (or .su domains or Russian IP addresses) from the internet. His is the practical take; why the generally open nature of internet routing and DNS means that any attempt to lock out Russia at …

Dan Graham of Austin, TX has an interesting side hustle, going after telemarketers violating the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) . I'm glad he's doing it, but the problem with this sort of thing has got to be how time consuming it is. I already have a f…

It's always good to check your email messages against the popular and free SpamAssassin spam filter (maybe even using my  KBXSCORE  tool?) to try to minimize your spam score. But sometimes the results can be cryptic, or you get a quite unexpected result . Understanding Spam…

Over on one of the forums the other day, somebody asked about best practices for redirects and link tracking for marketing email sends. Here's a few of my thoughts. First, it's important for me to say: avoid the open redirect. If you're using a redirect tool or fea…

Mike Robuck of Mobile World Live reports on a new SMS and call spam protection option for Verizon Wireless users here in the US: an updated free Call Filter app . I just downloaded it myself and it seemed pretty easy to set up. I recommend checking it out. Of course, they immed…