Showing posts with the label oops

Friday fun: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

Before my current life in this email universe, I worked in print production and pre-press , helping to assemble assemble advertising layouts for various ad agencies and brands, utilizing tools like Quark Xpress, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to type, draw, retouch and finaliz…

Having trouble with Apple Mail? You're not alone

If you've updated to iOS 18.5 recently and suddenly found that the Mail app on your iPhone is acting more like a frozen popsicle than a productivity tool, you're in good company, and not in a good way. Hundreds of iOS users have taken to Reddit to vent about Apple Mail …

SMTPUTF8 Errors and Bad Encoding: A Story

Has this ever happened to you? Because it just happened to me! In theory, I should be on top of this sort of thing, because I've been writing scripts and code to generate email messages since the late 1990s. But in practice, I sometimes take coding shortcuts that can have u…

Email Faceplants: When Hitting Send Hits Back

I once sent an email that made me want to crawl under my desk and disappear. But we’ll get to that in a minute. First, check this out: A pub chef was recently sacked after accidentally sending an email grievance about his boss to 180 people instead of to just one specific uppe…

Microsoft 365 was quarantining some image-containing emails (EX873252)

Microsoft's Exchange Online was suffering from a false positive filtering issue that led it to flag some emails as malware and quarantine them based on a false positive signature match for some percentage of emails containing images. Things I don't know: Was it all imag…

Play the lottery? Check your spam folder!

Oof, stories like this one make me want to cry . Sounds like emails from the Michigan Lottery were going to the spam folder. Hey, whoever's in charge of that, my recommendation would be to test for spam folder issues regularly, and do what you need to do to shore up engagem…

Fun with bad data: That doesn't go there!

Today's data question: What if we scanned the top one million domains, looking for DMARC records and DKIM records misconfigured so that they're living at the top level of the organizational domain? Well, I did that, and it turns out that there are more than 11,000 domai…

Don't double up on DMARC

Here's a new oops that I've observed a few times recently! In case you didn't know already, you can't have two DMARC records for your domain name. (I'm not talking about subdomains ... I'm talking about specifically having two DMARC DNS records at the sa…

Spamhaus: False positive issue on Friday 10/13

A number of folks have reached out to me (and posted on various forums) asking about a Spamhaus glitch last Friday night (October 13th), US time. I reached out to Matthew Stith at Spamhaus and he was able to confirm for me that there was indeed a temporary issue then that led t…

Oops: Important information about your Amazon gift card order

Don't fret! If you received an email from Amazon warning about gift card fraud that seems to imply that you recently purchased a gift card for Amazon, Google Play, or some other store, you're not alone. Amazon glitched and seems to have sent a bunch of these notificatio…

Spamhaus glitch Friday night

Blocklist provider and master spam-filterer Spamhaus had a glitch overnight (Friday to Saturday, August 18-19) starting at about 8:20 pm US central time. The glitch resulted in a bunch of false positive Spamhaus blocklistings. They were accidental and the listings have since b…

Hotmail.com SPF issue on August 18th

Looks like Microsoft has run into email authentication issues today. Specifically, the domain hotmail.com appears to have a broken SPF record wherein messages sent by Hotmail/Outlook.com/Microsoft OLC using a hotmail.com from address aren't passing SPF authentication. Here&…

Robservations: Tribune Publishing apologizes for phony phishing expedition

Chicago media reporter Robert Feder shared an interesting story today.  The Chicago Tribune recently sent a simulated phishing email to employees, to test them to see if they would "fall for" the phish and click on the links in the email message. This is somewhat stan…

Whoops: iOS 11 Mail Microsoft Issues

If you've upgraded your iPhones to the just-released iOS version 11 and your email is hosted by Microsoft's Outlook.com, Office 365 or Exchange 2016, you may now find yourself unable to send email from your iPhone. It sounds like a known issue and that it is being work…

Ask Al: Help! AHBL is blocking inbound mail!

Mickey writes, "I'm being blocked by AHBL. I own a tax and accounting firm. We send out two newsletters per year to our existing clients using an ESP. We give our clients every opportunity to be removed from the list if they so choose. We do not and have not spammed ev…

Gmail Oops

As reported over on the iDownload blog (and as mentioned to me by others), Gmail had a significant oops lately. Apparently, there was some system glitch that resulted in some actions (such as "delete" and "report spam" being applied to a message other than …

A Heck of an Oops

On December 28th, the NY Times sent an email, intended to go to about 300 people, out to over eight million email subscribers. At first, Times employees said it didn't come from them; it's forged, it's spam, ignore it . Many of us started to review the message sourc…

MAPS Blacklisted? It's True!

If this isn't proof that it can happen to anyone, I don't know what is: Apparently MAPS has a compromised computer, found to be sending spam, and that IP address is now blacklisted. A recent post to the SPAM-L discussion list tipped me off. Someone there noted hits i…

Google Code Search

On Friday, NetworkWorld talked about Google's new "Code Search" tool : "The company's new source-code search engine, unveiled Thursday as a tool to help simplify life for developers, can also be misused to search for software bugs, password information …