Validity just launched something very interesting: the Heatwave Domain Blocklist, and the goal is to identify and measure reputation of domains engaged in “synthetic warming” (automated exchanges between controlled mailboxes designed to make a young domain look trustworthy) and “active cold outreach” (live cold campaigning to real recipients). Find their press release here.
My take: Because this is targeting cold email / bulk outreach services, it will end up making their customers, and the cold mail sent, easier to identify and filter or block. Mailbox providers were already doing this to some degree. Cold email is ultimately unsolicited, and at bulk, it becomes Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE), a textbook definition of spam. Mailbox providers do often catch this at scale. Some invariably sneaks through the filtering, but MBPs know that this mail makes their users unhappy; thus, they don’t really intentionally want to deliver that kind of mail to the inbox.
Messaging industry anti-abuse group M3AAWG had previously put out a position paper condemning the deceptive nature of most cold email / bulk outreach practices.
That helped to set the stage to warn the world that these tools are not safe or smart to use. But that’s not enough. People don’t know, or don’t listen. And I see this myself. I get approached once or twice a week, every week, from folks looking for deliverability help, specifically, that they’ve run into inbox placement trouble after using one of these “warming” or “outreach” services and finding that at the end of the engagement, their domain reputation is actually worse than when they started.
That has long suggested to me that these tools are problematic. A company goes and signs up for one of these tools, being told that everything will be taken care of for them, all using common best practices, but that’s not what happens. Something robotic gets triggered in the background, spinning up a bunch of new domains, engaging in fake, bot-driven user feedback trying to boost domain reputation. And then it all collapses; it doesn’t work as promised, that’s when they approach me, looking for a magic fix to address their inbox woes.
This is one of those situations where an ounce of prevention is worth many pounds of cure. Domain reputation can be repaired, but it’s not an easy, fun or fast practice. Validity’s new blocklist helps, I think, make it clear that these tools are not best practice-aligned. That they should be avoided. I think that’s a good thing.
Validity draws a line in the sand here, as an authoritative industry voice clearly stating that these practices are not OK. And they also make it easier to filter or reject mail from domains engaged in these practices.
“Is all outreach email spam?” is not the question that this blocklist answers. That’s okay, in my opinion. I don’t interpret its intent as trying to identify and enable blocking of anyone who has ever sent a sales email. The intent, as I read it, is to help identify the bulk and deceptive side of cold email practices, specifically.
If you’re engaged in these practices today, should you be concerned? Yes. Even though there’s nothing to suggest that Microsoft or Google have immediately adopted this blocklist to use it in their systems for filtering or domain reputation scoring, I am certain that they’ll be watching closely. Mailbox providers are always looking for ways to better classify email messages and sending email domains; I suspect that this data will be valuable for that purpose..
Validity's Heatwave Domain Blocklist website says they've already got over a million domains listed.
Don’t just read my take on this; click through to learn more from Tyron Dizon and from Jennifer Nespola Lantz.
That helped to set the stage to warn the world that these tools are not safe or smart to use. But that’s not enough. People don’t know, or don’t listen. And I see this myself. I get approached once or twice a week, every week, from folks looking for deliverability help, specifically, that they’ve run into inbox placement trouble after using one of these “warming” or “outreach” services and finding that at the end of the engagement, their domain reputation is actually worse than when they started.
That has long suggested to me that these tools are problematic. A company goes and signs up for one of these tools, being told that everything will be taken care of for them, all using common best practices, but that’s not what happens. Something robotic gets triggered in the background, spinning up a bunch of new domains, engaging in fake, bot-driven user feedback trying to boost domain reputation. And then it all collapses; it doesn’t work as promised, that’s when they approach me, looking for a magic fix to address their inbox woes.
This is one of those situations where an ounce of prevention is worth many pounds of cure. Domain reputation can be repaired, but it’s not an easy, fun or fast practice. Validity’s new blocklist helps, I think, make it clear that these tools are not best practice-aligned. That they should be avoided. I think that’s a good thing.
Validity draws a line in the sand here, as an authoritative industry voice clearly stating that these practices are not OK. And they also make it easier to filter or reject mail from domains engaged in these practices.
“Is all outreach email spam?” is not the question that this blocklist answers. That’s okay, in my opinion. I don’t interpret its intent as trying to identify and enable blocking of anyone who has ever sent a sales email. The intent, as I read it, is to help identify the bulk and deceptive side of cold email practices, specifically.
If you’re engaged in these practices today, should you be concerned? Yes. Even though there’s nothing to suggest that Microsoft or Google have immediately adopted this blocklist to use it in their systems for filtering or domain reputation scoring, I am certain that they’ll be watching closely. Mailbox providers are always looking for ways to better classify email messages and sending email domains; I suspect that this data will be valuable for that purpose..
Validity's Heatwave Domain Blocklist website says they've already got over a million domains listed.
Don’t just read my take on this; click through to learn more from Tyron Dizon and from Jennifer Nespola Lantz.
