Spam Resource
Deceptive Design is a website that highlights “tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn’t mean to, like buying or signing up for something.” Read through their Hall of Shame and you’ll see that a lot of them are email related. Hidden/unclear/assumptive opt-in practices, forced newsletter subscriptions, inverted opt-in checkboxes, and more. Don’t be on this list, and don’t do things that are on this list!
I very recently scanned the most recent 1.4 million emails or so that I’ve received to look for BIMI logos. Of the 292,000 unique domains in that mail sample, a whopping 818 of them seem to have published BIMI records in DNS. That didn’t quite impress me, but I guess we have to keep in mind that it is mostly a spam feed I’m dealing with here. The legitimate senders are likely outnumbered by the garbage senders, and garbage senders are probably less likely to adopt BIMI. Anyway, of that 818 domains having BIMI records, 169 of them have Verified Mark Certificates (VMCs). So, of BIMI adopters, under a quarter of them seem to have taken the VMC plunge. This isn’t entirely a scientific sample, but it’s an interesting bit of data nonetheless.Note that I didn’t bother to check to see if they publish a DMARC record that is in…
DELIVTERMS: The weekly series here on Spam Resource that defines deliverability terminology. Today, I’m going to talk about HELO/EHLO.When you send me an email from your account on Outlook.com to my account at Gmail.com, Outlook builds the email message based on your content, then its outbound mail server connects to and transmits that message to an inbound mail server at Gmail. Those servers communicate with each other using a protocol called Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).When one server connects to another, the receiving server offers up a bit of text upon connect, called an SMTP banner. The sending server responds with a HELO (Hello) or EHLO (Extended Hello) command, basically saying “Hi, I am a mail server and my name is XYZ.”I don’t want to go too far into the weeds and turn this post into a whole breakdown of how SMTP works. Instead, let me focus on where the…
Privacy-first mailbox provider ProtonMail looks to be getting deeper into the email privacy game. Earlier this month they purchased a company called SimpleLogin, whose focus seems to be email aliasing and forwarding; sort of like Apple’s “Hide My Email” functionality. The goal seems to be to bring this functionality more natively into the ProtonMail experience. It’s good to have a competitor to Apple also seriously focused on privacy and tracking prevention, for those who want the functionality but don’t want to be part of the Apple universe. But that percentage of people who will be attracted to this, will they be enough to make ProtonMail a profit?
Remember EML files? Of course you do, but if not, I’ve blogged on the topic here previously.If you need to edit or view the raw headers or source from an email message, you can always just rename that file’s extension, changing it from “.eml” to “.txt” and then opening it up in your favorite text editor.But what if you want to do more? Here are three cool tools that allow you to visualize, extract or edit the content from EML files. What’s great about these is that each of the tools has a different focus.First, there’s emailpreview from Stephanie Griffith. Upon visiting, the first words you’ll see are, “Saving emails is a pain in the ass. We made it easy.” She’s right on both counts. Using this cool tool, you can take an EML file, or a URL, or raw HTML, and create an email preview image that you can…
Slice it up thin and fry it up nice; it goes great with eggs and hash browns for breakfast. But what to do with the rest of it? Don’t forget to refrigerate the now half-filled open tin; apparently folks don’t always remember to do this! To remind yourself how to avoid this and other mistakes while preparing the delicious foodstuff that is SPAM, click on through to read “Mistakes Everyone Makes While Cooking Spam” by Samantha Maxwell for Mashed.Don’t miss the bit about the meat explosion.
Jennifer Nespola Lantz does it again! Last time it was a deep dive into the topic of IP warming, this time around it is everything you need to know about email authentication technology (and related bits), covering SPF, DKIM, DMARC and BIMI!Click on through for the first in the series (An Introduction to Email Authentication), and you’ll find links right there that can take you to the rest of the posts in the series. Or, if you’re looking to jump directly to a specific article, here you go:Part 1: Why Email Authentication Matters to Your Email ProgramPart 2: Understanding SPF AuthenticationPart 3: Understanding DKIM AuthenticationPart 4: Understanding DMARC AuthenticationPart 5: Understanding BIMI
Andy Boxall from DigitalTrends helps to explain what’s been bugging me lately: SMS spammers are going nuts in the US at the moment. Besides reporting the spam to 7726, what can you do? I assume the mobile providers are chasing after the bad guys, and I also assume that its a very slow process. Eventually we’ll hear about lawsuits. Maybe years from now. Somebody will regret this — but until then, what? At this point I’m starting to wish I could just disable SMS completely on my phone.
DELIVTERMS: The Monday series here on Spam Resource that defines deliverability terminology. Today, I’m going to talk about VERP: Variable Envelope Return Path.VERP (Variable Envelope Return Path) is where you encode the return-path address (remember that from last week) on a per-recipient basis, uniquely changing it for each recipient. If somebody sends an email to two people, you and me, your copy of the email message will have a return-path header with a one code in it, and my return-path header will have a different code in it. (You can find examples over on the VERP Wikpedia page.)Why? VERP helps email sending platforms (ESPs, CRMs, etc.) more easily track which email messages weren’t delivered — which ones bounced back to the sender.To understand how VERP helps with bounce tracking, we need to understand how bounces are communicated between senders and receivers. There are basically two ways bounces can be communicated…
It’s my first official post for the work blog! With an infographic (sort of) that you can borrow! Over at Kickbox, read about the history of ISP and mailbox provider spam filtering, as remembered by…me! It’s been fun to watch the evolution of email technology, email marketing best practices, spam filtering and more over these past twenty five years. It’s also a good reminder that email is not standing still. It’s not dead tech, it’s not old tech. There’s still new stuff to be learned, every day and every year. Keep learning!That cool graphic I promised? Of course it’s not the one above; I didn’t include it here, as to not spoil the surprise. Click on through to check it out!