DELIVTERMS: Mailop

It's time for another entry in the DELIVTERMS series here on Spam Resource, where we define deliverability and email technology terms to help make them easier for email senders to understand. Today, we're leaning toward the operational, in that the term we're defining is: Mailop.

What is Mailop? Mailop is an email operations-specific email discussion list, meant to allow email administrators to collaborate on operational email issues.

What Mailop is not

Mailop is not a place to report your spam, or that you're mad at a spammer, or that you want to fight with people about why email platform X is a spammer haven. Nor is it a place to explain your business model and why it's unfair that somebody's blocking you for sending cold lead email. Reputational issues, in short, are not hashed out here.

What Mailop is

Mailop IS, however, a place to note that you're seeing mail server queues back up due to unexpected 4xx deferrals at a mailbox provider like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo (or elsewhere) due to what looks like system issues on the receiving side, and asking to see if somebody else has been running into similar issues.

Things meant for Mailop

If you're having an odd problem signing up for the Comcast ISP feedback loop, or if you're thinking that Yahoo is unable to parse your tested-and-working DKIM authentication settings, you're concerned that the State of Wisconsin is having trouble with your SPF record, you're wondering about this weird bounce message you're getting from Gmail, nobody seems home at a certain junk email filter, does anyone know how to get a response, or I'm blocking mail from email send platform X because of malformed message-ID headers but I wish I could help them fix it, what should I do?

These are all the kind of operational issues that are good things to raise on the Mailop list, and indeed, these are all examples of things that were raised there in the past month or two.

As the mailing list's website notes, Mailop has been around since 2008 and has over 2000 members. It is "designed to improve the dialogue and build relationships between mail operators."

Mailop is also a place where you should be collegiate and kind and helpful. We're email professionals, and we should act like it. It's rare that somebody gets bounced from the list for acting like a jerk, but I have seen it happen, and rightfully so.

Learn more

Head on over to the Mailop website to learn more, and sign up for the list, if you think it'll help to be in contact with other folks sending and receiving email at scale, to work collaboratively to address operational issues in the email ecosystem.

It's not the only forum like that in the world, but it's an open one, and a good one, and a good place to start.

And if you want to learn more about email deliverability and technology, be sure to check the DELIVTERMS section here on the Spam Resource website. We've got a bunch of stuff to explain to you!