Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

Over on the Bronto Blog, Waynette Tubbs reports shares a client's experience with email list stagnation, re-engagement, and how to deal with letting go. It's a smart marketer that can delete 30% of the email list the right way and end up seeing positive gains! Get rid …

I really like my 2014 Lincoln MKZ. It's sort of the one flashy thing I own. I don't have a big house or wear fancy clothes, but I enjoy my nice ride. And I was really happy with my purchasing experience at Napelton Lincoln in Glenview , just outside of Chicago. Since I …

Mail.ru just announced that they're moving the domains mail.ua and corp.mail.ru to a restrictive "p=reject" DMARC policy on March 29, 2016. They previously announced that they were moving domains to "p=reject," beginning with the domain my.com this mont…

Steve Atkins of Word to the Wise just released a cool new tool: SPF Minimizer . Over on the Word to the Wise blog, he explains how it works and provides an extremely insightful explanation of do's and don'ts when it comes to SPF, aka Sender Policy Framework.

Once upon a time, Sender ID was a sort of Hotmail-specific version of Sender Policy Framework (SPF). It used to be valuable and necessary to maximize your chances at getting solid inbox deliverability at Hotmail. There used to be these tricks you had to do; like, if mail was b…

Over on Betanews, Ian Barker asks : "What do California and New York have in common? They're both major centers of spam email according to new research, between them accounting for almost half of spam sent in the US." Over here on Spam Resource, I ask: What do Uta…

My friend and deliverability colleague Josie Garcia sent me this picture yesterday. It's a picture of her printout of a specific page from this blog, from sometime around a hundred years ago. Specifically, it's a post from 2007 , where I replied to and rebutted a "…

SPF ( Sender Policy Framework ) still matters in 2016. Lots of folks might be authenticating with DKIM now, but SPF is a useful fallback mechanism and in my oh-so-humble opinion, everybody sending email with their own domain name should publish an SPF record. An SPF record is p…

Without the work of Ray and so many others, would I even have a career today? Rest in peace, good sir .

Don't go rushing out to buy a domain name under the ".download" TLD (top level domain) just yet; Spamhaus says just over three quarters of registered domains under that new TLD are bad news. This kind of data tends to lead spam filterers to treat all mail from t…

You may recall that Yahoo initially implemented a "p=reject" DMARC policy back in April, 2014 for their primary yahoo.com domain name. (And AOL did the same for aol.com shortly after.) This changed the email landscape significantly. Now, nearly two years later, the …

Over at Spamtacular, Mickey Chandler explains why he, like so many other smart deliverability people (including myself) take issue with lead generation and payday loan senders. The example he cites is a pretty egregious example of sharing and horribly misusing individuals'…

MailChimp recently published a smart, data-driven take on how best to deal with inactive subscribers, suggesting that keeping them around makes the most sense. It's not bad advice, but there's a few very important asterisks to add to it. I f you can get mail to  those …

Lifehacker and Litmus both tipped me off to the fact that Outlook.com email users got quite a significant update to their user interface today. You can read all about it  here and here . In case you don't remember, this of course used to be called Microsoft Live Hotmail. U…

Today on the DMARC-Discuss mailing list, a representative of Mail.ru announced that they plan to move to a restrictive p=reject DMARC policy. They plan to start with the domain my.com, moving this domain to a p=reject DMARC policy on March 1, 2016. They plan to move other Mail…

Hey, your mail was delayed. Was it delayed inside of the ISP, or was it queued up in your ESP's outbound mail server waiting to connect to Yahoo or Gmail? Here's how to tell. First, add your own address to the mailing list, so you can get a copy of each mailing that goe…

Today's guest post is from deliverability professional Chris Truitt. Here's his take on the impact contest signups have on your deliverability and campaign success. An ever more popular method of lead generation is through contest offerings. You may have seen such offer…

Slashdot asked the other day, " Why Are Major Companies Exiting the Spam Filtering Business? " It sounds a bit like they're trying to take two events and define them together as a trend, but I don't think that holds up under scrutiny. I guess they've got a…

Here are ten simple list building tests that I keep in my pocket, to share with folks when they ask. Some are better than others, but most of them are easy, no-brainer things that anybody running a site trying to build a list of subscribers should be doing. Require registration…

Back in my e-commerce days, we used to use this "one weird trick" to help reduce spam complaint rates: We put a prominent "click here to unsubscribe" link at the top of the email message. No need to scroll down to the footer to unsubscribe. What happened? Sp…

That's a novel way to request unblocking: Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow recently posted a request for an AT&T representative to help assist with getting his mail server unblocked.

Industry group M3AAWG (the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group) just published an overview of what ISP Feedback Loops (FBLs) are and how they work. They've also included a comprehensive list of known ISP Feedback Loops. Click here to check them out .

Found on the web:  Gina Lofaro explains the user experience of finding it hard to unsubscribe . What galls me is that the list owner actually decided it was wise to argue the law with an angry subscriber. Knock that off! If she wants off the list, say OK, thank you, and it has …

Based on page views, here's what was most popular on Spam Resource throughout 2015. (I'm sensing a theme...) Ask Al: My email address is being used in spam! Email address forgery is still a big deal, as measured by the number of people finding their way to my blog base…

SendGrid's Kirill Popov left a most helpful and timely comment on my previous DMARC record-related post . He writes: "Even if you're *reasonably* sure that you have done all the diligence above and do not expect a lot of rejects, make sure your RUF and RUA addresse…