Tag Archives: WordToTheWise

This morning hundreds of delivery folks logged into their Google Postmaster Tools account to see their IP reputation was bad. Even one of my client’s that is using a major ESP shared pools is seeing bad IP reputation on December 10, 2019. The good news is this doesn’t seem to be affecting delivery. Most folks are reporting no delivery issues at Gmail and no change…

Many years ago, we bought a VMWare license to manage the various virtual machines running our business infrastructure. As part of our move to Dublin, we decommissioned our cabinet and moved all of services into various bits of the cloud. This meant that when our VMWare support contract came up for renewal we declined the renewal. Despite no longer being customers and unsubscribing from email,…

Sendgrid announced their volumes for Black Friday and Cyber Monday: To provide a clearer understanding of our scalable systems, on Black Friday 2019 we processed 4.1 billion emails and this Cyber Monday we processed 4.2 billion emails (46% more than 2018) and processed up to 315 million emails/hour (burst rate) into inboxes all around the world! To give you a better understanding of this scale, you can…

I’m basically waiting for the various ESPs to announce Just How Much Mail they’ve sent over the last 4 days. Early information from one ESP shows a hefty percentage over the amount they sent last year, and that amount had many, many, many zeros in it. In terms of best practices and ongoing advice: you can never put too many lights on a Christmas tree.

I’ve shared a version of this image repeatedly. I think it was only my Facebook friends that got the stick figure screaming in frustration, though. The reality is bounce handling is one of the most frustrating pieces of email delivery. Not only that, many people in the email space treat it as a simple process. It’s really not as simple as we’d like it to…

The phishing attack against Sendgrid is still going on. Most of the mail and the websites are being hosted on Linode. I’ve still not gotten to see what one of the sites looks like, as Linode is getting the sites down before I click on the links. Everyone here is doing the Right Things(tm) in order to address the problem. Sendgrid has a p=reject message…

For a long time one of the “best practices” for links in html content has been to avoid having anything that looks like a URL or hostname in the visible content of the link, as ISP phishing filters are very, very suspicious of links that seem to mislead recipients about where the link goes to. They’re a very common pattern in phishing emails. /* This…

The nice folks at Kickbox asked me what I thought the biggest myths about spamtraps were. I said: I think the biggest misconception is that spamtraps are the reason for delivery failures, whether blocking or spamfoldering. When the article came out, I was highly amused to see that John from Campaign Monitor said the same thing in his first sentence, too. A common misconception is that spamtraps are…

One of the interesting things about moving to the EU is experiencing the internet where GDPR is a thing. We get asked permission for everything. Including if we want shopping cart updates.

There is currently a phishing attack against a major ESP. The mail came through what I presume was a compromised account hosted at one of the providers. It’s just as possible this was a domain set up for the sole purpose of phishing, though. The underlying attack is pretty good. They took the ESP compliance notification email and changed a couple of the links to…

Saw a new disclaimer on mail sent to an address harvested off our website today: disclaimer: This is an advertisement and a promotional mail-in adherence to the guidelines of CAN-SPAM act 2003. We have clearly mentioned the source id of this mail, also clearly mentioned the subject line, and they are in no way misleading in any form. We have found your email address through…

A couple folks have asked me recently about MX records that they don’t understand. These records consist of a single . or they contain localhost or they are 127.0.0.1. In all cases, the domain owners use these records to signal that the domains don’t accept email. What do these records look like? Why do domains do this? In all cases it’s because the domain owners…

When we talk about filters, we often think there is one filter. But, in many cases there are multiple stages of filters, each examining mail in a different way. In deliverability terms the easiest filters to ignore are the individual user filters. Mostly because there’s nothing we can do about those. These are the baysean style filters built into a lot of email clients as…

Someone recently asked when they should purge addresses to remove spamtraps. To my mind this is actually the wrong question. Purging addresses that don’t engage is rarely about spamtraps, it’s about your overall communication processes. Well maintained traps will actively bounce mail for 6 – 12 months before turning the address into a trap. In those cases it’s mostly the whole domain being turned into…