Spam Resource
Spoiler: It’s when Icelandic horses respond to your work emails for you.The blog Government Technology explains in more detail.
Validity manages ISP feedback loops for a whole bunch of ISPs (30+) all around the world. They’ve got a signup and management interface for this “Universal Feedback Loop Service” at fbl.validity.com. And they have just announced that they’ve added SFR and Gandi to the list of ISP Feedback Loops that they have coordinated into this management interface.The current total list of ISPs and mailbox providers supported via this Universal Feedback Loop Service now includes: BlueTie, Comcast, Cox, Fastmail, Gandi, ItaliaOnline, LiberoMail, Virgilio, Laposte.net, Liberty Global, UnityMedia, UPC, Locaweb, Mail.ru, OpenSRS, Rackspace, Seznam.cz, SFR, SilverSky, Swisscom, Synacor, TIM, Telenet, Telenor, Telstra, Terra, UOL, Virgin Media, XS4ALL, Yandex, and Ziggo.Senders, if you register for your own feedback loops (some ESP/CRM platforms handle this for you), you’ll want to head over to the Universal Feedback Loop Service website and see about signing up. Feedback loops are an extremely valuable deliverability mechanism that helps you…
“Is this message transactional, or is it commercial?” That’s a question I get asked quite regularly as a deliverability consultant. Note that I am not a lawyer, so I can’t give you legal advice. I can, however, provide my layman’s interpretation and encourage you to investigate for yourself, suggest to you where you need to look, and you can throw it all to your legal counsel, for a final ruling on the matter, if needed.Assuming you are based in the US and are sending (only) to US-based recipients, the US federal CAN-SPAM law applies. The text of the law itself (section 3) provides a fairly straightforward definition of what constitutes a transactional message, and the FTC later published even more helpful clarifying definitions — which is what you should read, memorize, and bookmark for future reference. It starts with this. It’s transactional, if the primary purpose of the email message is:to facilitate, complete,…
Adobe is hiring! They’re looking for a Professional Services Deliverability Consultant. Could that be you? In that role, you would: “Work with Global Deliverability Consulting clients to promote email best practices, oversee detailed investigations and communicate with internal and external customers regarding deliverability issues, provide guidance during new client onboarding & IP ramp-up process, support client delivery issues, inquiries, and tickets and provide recommendations for corrective action, understand and apply industry policies and procedures related to email deliverability issues, create and present deliverability reviews, reports, and presentations,” and more! Click through for more details or to apply.
BIMI’s so hot right now! Everybody’s asking me lately which ISPs support it and how do I set it up and do I need a VMC and more! Lots of smart folks have implemented a BIMI logo already — and I think BIMI adoption is poised to explode…maybe making this the summer of BIMI? Or maybe not, because stuff always seems to moves slower than I hope it will. But hey, it was an excuse to make a fun graphic!As far as ISP and mailbox provider support for BIMI logos, we’re basically at the same place we were back when I last posted a status update back in January, 2022. The usual suspects are still in the same place as before: Yahoo, Gmail and Fastmail will display BIMI logos, Gmail requires a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC), and Microsoft hasn’t announced anything on the logo front in years, sadly. For more…
Now hiring! “Act-On, a leading provider of SaaS based Digital Marketing Services, is looking for a Deliverability Consultant to join our tight knit team of 6 marketing automation enthusiasts. You will be responsible for managing a variety of key clients who have signed up for enhanced deliverability services. You will be in charge of leading customer meetings, providing daily campaign monitoring, ISP monitoring and blocklist remediation, in-product automation guidance, and client consultation (pertaining to industry best practices around email deliverability and marketing strategy). The successful candidate will bring a broad understanding of client requirements to ensure ongoing positive relationships with clients and industry professionals. This role offers a lot of growth and learning opportunities amongst an awesome group of email professionals!”For more information or to apply, click here.
I noticed these job postings on Linkedin and thought I would share them along because email/mobile messaging/abuse fighting engineering roles are kind of scarce and rather a fun area to work in, I suspect. And I’ve got a friend who recently went to this company and seems really happy there.First, a position based in France that really interests me. Maybe I need to move to France and apply for this one. But assuming I don’t, here’s what you need to know:”Cloudmark as part of Proofpoint is looking for a Messaging Gateway Software Engineer to join our engineering team in Paris. The Cloudmark team builds software to provide high performance messaging security services to customers around the world, including AT&T, Comcast, Orange and Swisscom. We are looking for someone who is passionate about building high performance software and joining the fight against messaging abuse.”Interested? Click here for more details and/or to…
DELIVTERMS: The weekly series here on Spam Resource that defines deliverability terminology. Today, I’m going to talk about blocklists.What are blocklists? Also called blocking lists, they are lists of IP addresses and/or domain names that are used as spam filters to plug into various email servers and spam filters. The implication is typically that by inclusion of a particular IP address or domain name on that blocklist, that the publisher of that blocklist perceived or believed that the user or owner of that IP address or domain name was engaged in sending spam, or some other unsavory practice.It was common for some folks to call them “blacklists,” though most operators of blocklists avoided that term. Today, most folks refer to them as “blocklists.”Technical terms that typically refer to a blocklist include:RBL (Realtime Blockhole List): Technically refers (only) to the MAPS RBL, one of the first blocklists, but some folks use…
Jeff Butts from Mac Observer walks you through how to send an email using Apple’s “Hide My Email” functionality from your iOS device.Neat idea…except that it doesn’t seem to work for me, on my iPhone 12 Mini running iOS 15.4.1. I just get an error message that says, “Hide my Email is currently unavailable.” Apparently, I’m not the only one. Is this feature perhaps a bit buggy?
I’m only a couple hours into my day today and so far I’ve received three different emails from three completely different senders, each inviting me to go look at the same exciting erotic webcam site. Each email message came from what I think is a legitimate sender — the latest one, from some sort of online sushi-related website, which I think is owned by some sort of sushi restaurant or delivery service, probably based in France, given the domain name used. I don’t think this online maki maker intended to advertise an adult website, but I suspect that they have open text fields in their registration forms or forward-to-a-friend forms that some spammer is exploiting to send out the gross porn links. And when I, and everybody else, report the mail as spam, the deliverability damage lands squarely on the sushi seller’s domain and IP address. Which sucks.The fact that…