Showing posts with the label word to the wise

Steve Atkins: Running Swaks on Macs

Swaks has long been my favorite quick and dirty tool for poking at mail servers. It's powerful, flexible, scriptable, and it doesn't hide anything behind a shiny GUI. I find it perfect for connecting to email servers behind MX records to test all kinds of SMTP scenarios. If you missed it, I last wrote a bit about it here: Swaks is a cool tool and has been updated. And if you're o…
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Yahoo problems? Could be SOA record issues in DNS

Are you seeing this bounce message when trying to send mail to Yahoo subscribers? 451 Message temporarily deferred due to unresolvable RFC.5321 from domain; see https://postmaster.yahooinc.com/error-codes And you've checked and confirmed that your sending domain seems to re…

A DMARC Dictionary from dmarcian (and more!)

I've got just enough time for a quick post today, to share with you this very useful DMARC Dictionary put together by the fine folks at dmarcian . Check it out ! And since that would make for a very short blog post, here's four bonus online resources that you might als…

Top 10 Email Security Blogs...from 2010

Check out this list of top ten email/security blogs from November 2010. You know which URLs still resolve? Which ones are clearly still here? Only three of the ten.* Me! Al Iverson, Spam Resource . Laura Atkins,  Word to the Wise . Mickey Chandler, Spamtacular . All three of us…

List-Unsubscribe header: You need it!

Allow me to distill this very insightful article from Word to the Wise down to four simple points: Microsoft wants you to include the list-unsubscribe header. And today, you'll want to use the "mailto" version, not the "http" version. If you don't,…

More Transitions: AOL/Yahoo Consolidation

Remember how I said that I thought 2018 would be the year of consolidation ? First you had the Microsoft platform consolidation, the merging of their Office 365 and Hotmail platforms. A lot of senders are still dealing with issues around that transition. Now we're gett…

Putting the "free" myth to bed

Word to the Wise's Laura Atkins, like me, often gets asked about words to avoid in subject lines. Is it OK to use the word "free" in a subject line? I read that causes spam filtering! Not true, Laura patiently explains . Like Laura, I've been trying to explain…

Sending mail over IPv6? Authenticate!

Josh over at Word to the Wise explains that as Microsoft brings live IPv6 support for its Office365/Exchange Online Protection email platforms, they're mandating that all mail sent over IPv6 must authenticate with either Sender Policy Framework (SPF) or DomainKeys Identifie…

A bit of spam history

Steve Atkins of Word to the Wise has posted a very interesting story , detailing a little bit of spam history from just over ten years ago. According to Steve, a gentleman who used to work for a spammer participated in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) question and answer session,…

Size isn’t the only metric

Laura Atkins beat me to it, writing about this new MarketingSherpa case study wherein a company decimated their list and actually grew revenue. Go read her taken on it over at the Word to the Wise blog .

ARF: Now a Proposed Standard

ARF (Abuse Reporting Format), a simple specification that enables senders of email abuse reports (like, spam complaints and feedback loop reports, for example) to easily and appropriately encapsulate those reports in a way that ensures the receiving site will have all the infor…

The E360 Pantsing Continues

Laura Atkins writes today about the newly discovered settlement between 'email marketer' E360 and Comcast: "Today, only weeks before the trial date, a settlement agreement was filed. The settlement agreement prohibits the defendants and any group associated with th…

Not How It Works

The context: Over on Laura Atkins' Word to the Wise blog , she talks about the coming changes. The coming storm, if you will. How ISPs are fed up with sender practices. She rightly points out, that the rope ISPs currently give ESPs, is going to be used to hang a bad guy som…