Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

On Thursday, AOL launched iOS and Android versions of "Alto," a "proprietary email intelligence engine built to analyze and restructure the mountain of valuable data buried across multiple inboxes," aka a fancy new email client with time-saving email-sorting…

ISP Feedback Loops (FBL) are valuable for email senders and email service providers (ESPs). It provides valuable information on who is complaining about your mail. Not only does it (usually) allow you to unsubscribe people who complain, preventing them from lodging any addition…

Mailman is a very popular open source mailing list management software package. It's been around for a long time -- since the late 1990s, according to Wikipedia . Sites using Mailman to manage discussion lists were negatively impacted by the roll-out of DMARC, specifically …

Litmus recently shared news that is sure to make email designers everywhere light up with glee: "On August 31, 2016, Gmail began supporting the CSS property display: none;. And today, Gmail announced they will begin supporting <style> and media queries later this mon…

SendGrid's Paul Kincaid-Smith's has a post up this morning about the "tsunami of unwanted email" generated by the bad guys out there using botnets to subscription bomb (aka harass) people and why you should secure subscription signup forms. The bad news is, t…

This is pretty slick. When is the last time you selected "View Source" in Gmail to look at the raw headers and body content of an email message? As of a couple of days ago, Google has added some nice new info to this feature, showing an easy-to-understand summary of a…

Back in 2014, MailChimp published data showing what happens when you mail to purchased lists. Though it is now a couple of years old, it's still solid research and quite relevant today. MailChimp's John Foreman summarizes it thusly: If we look at campaign performance ve…

Microsoft recently announced that on November 1, 2016, they will stop generating updates for Microsoft Exchange's "SmartScreen" spam filters used in Microsoft Exchange Server and the Outlook (Windows) desktop client. Read more about it here . What does this mean? …

If you're having deliverability issues, I can tell you from my experience that you aren't really going to be able to get back to the inbox if any of the following types of subscriber list sources are in play: Co-registration or "lead generation." Every smart m…

Kayla Lewkowicz of Litmus breaks it down:  Seven common deliverability-related assumptions that just aren't true. She explains whether or not it's OK to use FREE in a subject line, or is Yahoo to blame when Yahoo blocks your mail, and provides even more solid explanati…

A representative of Facebook confirmed for me that the email service handling mail for facebook.com email addresses is no more. PC Mag  had previously shared that FB was warning users back in April that this was coming. Thus, it is now safe to block, reject, unsubscribe or othe…

In case you've been living under a rock, or you've been lucky enough to not be affected, here's the deal: Some bad guys, probably Russian or Eastern European, have decided to mail-bomb unsuspecting folks by signing them up for many hundreds or thousands of mailing l…

Since about 6:00 am eastern this morning, Thursday, August 25, Yahoo has been deferring delivery attempts from almost everyone ESP or mail platform I'm hearing from. My guess is that there's a spam filter update issue or system capacity issue over at Yahoo. As far as we…

Someone asked me the other day, where can they get a new IP address? Their current IP address is "blacklisted" at Yahoo and Hotmail, I was told. It's easy enough to get a new domain name, but what about the IP address? They let me know that their deliverability wa…

Google just announced that if a message received at Gmail cannot be authenticated by way of either DKIM or SPF, the user interface is going to show a question mark in place of the sender's avatar or logo. Click here to learn more .

Verizon announced today that they are buying (most of) Yahoo for 4.8 billion dollars in cash. Back in 2015, they purchased AOL for 4.4 billion dollars. This means that three different email receiving platforms are now owned by one entity: Verizon. It's hard to saay what b…

If you work the abuse desk for an email service provider, you've undoubtably gotten spam reports from angry Spamcop users who think that your ESP, your employer, is "refusing" Spamcop reports. Truth be told, Spamcop disallows reports to be sent to email service p…

Periodically I create a virgin Gmail account and sign it up for something, to see what other kind of stuff might end up in the inbox. On February 22, 2010, I clicked on a single "free ipad" co-reg marketing ad, and left the checkboxes checked. I watched the mail comin…

Word to the Wise's Laura Atkins is quoted in this article from Wired, " Mailchimp Sends a Billion Email a Day. That's the Easy Part ." It's not a bad primer on Email Reputation 101, and why you can't just shovel spam at ISPs and except them to take it.…

I've been asked this question pretty regularly: How do I tell the world that a certain domain of mine isn't valid for sending email? What about typo domains, bad domains? How can they configure things to tell the world that no legitimate mail should have this domain in …

It's been just over five years since a particular goober harvested his LinkedIn contact list and spammed me and a bunch of other folks. Consider that the next time it happened, with somebody else doing it, was just now, I guess that means that it's safe to say that not…

Various online sites are reporting that Apple's iOS operating system version 10 is going to add support for the list unsubscribe header found in many email messages. In case you're wondering, it does sound like this unsubscribe feature supports the "mailto" ve…

Another spammer put under the microscope! Brian Krebs reports on the FBI arrest of Michael A. Persaud , reported to be one of the world's top ten spammers.

Ah,  Sanford Wallace . 1990s spammer, widely blocked and blacklisted, one of a few big bad spammers who made the rest of us realize that spam was a real problem and that we had to do something about it. Way back in 1999, in a Usenet discussion thread about Sanford, one of my fe…

"Send to Dad by Sunday midnight!" the email's subject line exclaims. My father is currently in hospice care. He isn't reading a lot of emails. He probably doesn't need this valuable offer. This reminds me a lot of the multiple "Don't miss out on M…