January and February were not kind to many email senders and mailbox providers. Glitches were to be found and experienced. Google accidentally misclassified a bunch of emails at one point. Yahoo and Apple seemed to be accidentally rejecting non-spam messages for a time. And Microsoft definitely had a higher-than-usual number of issues reported by senders. Indeed, Microsoft acknowledged that something is up by adding a warning banner across the top of their sender support form at some point in February.
And that’s just four mailbox providers. But, significant ones, the biggest ones, the “MAGY” top tier.
But, does it mean that email is busted? No, I don’t think that it does.
Glitches come, glitches go
If you’ve been doing this long enough, you know that glitches happen. We might have had a slightly rougher than usual couple of months – maybe. But every one of these mailbox providers, and many others, have accidentally blocked people before. I can think of a couple of times in the past that Gmail glitched enough to reject mail to legit recipients with “user unknown” errors. (Cleaning that up in the bounce logic of the email marketing platform I worked on was a challenge!) Just doing a quick scan of my own blog, shows that in the past few years, I’ve blogged about: iCloud private relay issues. Yahoo inbound delivery delays. Microsoft throwing 451 4.7.500 server busy delays. SNDS verification emails not sending. FBL emails not sending. GPT downtime. Broken spam filters. Unexplained IPv6 deferral issues. And more.
It is not just mailbox providers, either. I’ve seen Spamhaus accidentally typo which IPs they’re blocklisting, and I’ve seen other blocklists break DNS badly enough to unintentionally, but effectively, “blocklist the whole world.”
In other words, receiving mail at scale is tricky and has more moving parts than you will ever imagine.
We all have issues
If you’re a big email sender, you already know that email is tricky from your side. Especially if you’ve ever emailed the wrong list. Messed up segmentation. Accidentally forgot to apply the exclusion list. Dug too deep into an old database. Sometimes you’ve hit the wrong button. I know I have, and not just that one time where I accidentally sent a client’s test email to the full database of 80,000 people.
We’re human, we err on occasion, and even if we’re not making an error, we might be making a choice in execution that somebody else might not agree with. Or we’re testing a hypothesis to see how it works out. Some things have to be tested in the real world. Sometimes, code must be tested in production.
The new reality: It is getting harder
Email, overall, is getting more complex, and mailbox providers, in their increasing efforts to keep the really bad stuff out of the inbox, are becoming more restrictive about what you must do (and must not do) to get your wanted mail to the inbox. Email auth is a must. Broken infrastructure is no longer allowed. Spammers enter at your own risk. Bad guys are launching badder and badder threats at the inbox at lightning speed, thanks to A.I.
So, systems must continually be hardened. And as those systems are hardened, the more likely it is that a few innocent bystanders could get caught up in it all, along the way.
Which means ... sender requirements are evolving, are tightening. Be careful and be sure to keep up.
And it also means ... glitches happen sometimes. That evolution requires change and updates and updates are made by humans, and humans occasionally make mistakes.
January and February were not kind to many email senders and mailbox providers. Glitches were to be found and experienced. Google accidentally misclassified a bunch of emails at one point. Yahoo and Apple seemed to be accidentally rejecting non-spam messages for a time. And Microsoft definitely had a higher-than-usual number of issues reported by senders. Indeed, Microsoft acknowledged that something is up by adding a warning banner across the top of their sender support form at some point in February.
And that’s just four mailbox providers. But, significant ones, the biggest ones, the “MAGY” top tier.
But, does it mean that email is busted? No, I don’t think that it does.
Glitches come, glitches go
If you’ve been doing this long enough, you know that glitches happen. We might have had a slightly rougher than usual couple of months – maybe. But every one of these mailbox providers, and many others, have accidentally blocked people before. I can think of a couple of times in the past that Gmail glitched enough to reject mail to legit recipients with “user unknown” errors. (Cleaning that up in the bounce logic of the email marketing platform I worked on was a challenge!) Just doing a quick scan of my own blog, shows that in the past few years, I’ve blogged about: iCloud private relay issues. Yahoo inbound delivery delays. Microsoft throwing 451 4.7.500 server busy delays. SNDS verification emails not sending. FBL emails not sending. GPT downtime. Broken spam filters. Unexplained IPv6 deferral issues. And more.It is not just mailbox providers, either. I’ve seen Spamhaus accidentally typo which IPs they’re blocklisting, and I’ve seen other blocklists break DNS badly enough to unintentionally, but effectively, “blocklist the whole world.”
In other words, receiving mail at scale is tricky and has more moving parts than you will ever imagine.
We all have issues
If you’re a big email sender, you already know that email is tricky from your side. Especially if you’ve ever emailed the wrong list. Messed up segmentation. Accidentally forgot to apply the exclusion list. Dug too deep into an old database. Sometimes you’ve hit the wrong button. I know I have, and not just that one time where I accidentally sent a client’s test email to the full database of 80,000 people.We’re human, we err on occasion, and even if we’re not making an error, we might be making a choice in execution that somebody else might not agree with. Or we’re testing a hypothesis to see how it works out. Some things have to be tested in the real world. Sometimes, code must be tested in production.
The new reality: It is getting harder
Email, overall, is getting more complex, and mailbox providers, in their increasing efforts to keep the really bad stuff out of the inbox, are becoming more restrictive about what you must do (and must not do) to get your wanted mail to the inbox. Email auth is a must. Broken infrastructure is no longer allowed. Spammers enter at your own risk. Bad guys are launching badder and badder threats at the inbox at lightning speed, thanks to A.I.So, systems must continually be hardened. And as those systems are hardened, the more likely it is that a few innocent bystanders could get caught up in it all, along the way.
Which means ... sender requirements are evolving, are tightening. Be careful and be sure to keep up.
And it also means ... glitches happen sometimes. That evolution requires change and updates and updates are made by humans, and humans occasionally make mistakes.
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