Spam Resource
Founded in 2011, Help Scout is “the all-in-one support platform designed to help scaling companies turn customers into brand ambassadors.” And they’re hiring!They are looking for an Email Deliverability Engineer. Could that be you? “Email sits at the heart of our product, powering conversations for 12,000+ customers. As a Help Scout Email Deliverability Engineer, you will be partnering with our CTO and other senior engineers to build and optimize our email and data deliverability solutions.”If “this isn’t your first rodeo and you have some years under your belt working in an email deliverability role for an organization with medium to large scale email operations, and you know DNS, TLS, FBLs, DMARC, DKIM, and SPF backwards and forwards,” then it sounds like you should apply! Click here for more information and/or to apply.
Yum! From the Daily Herald of Everett Washington, I share with you a wonderful recipe from Taylor Goebel that will allow you to make make cheesy little SPAM sandwiches, suitable for a snack or party appetizer. These “Thursday Night Sandwiches” sound simple to make but, surprisingly, it’s not something I’ve seen before. Check it out!
What is COI/DOI? It’s just address validation and permission verification — you send a welcome or verification message and the recipient has to click on a link to prove they want the subscription. And it’s not a new thing, here’s me talking about it on this very blog fifteen years ago.I consider the terms “double opt-in” and “confirmed opt-in” are interchangeable. I find that most of the time, internet security and anti-spam folks call it COI, and marketers and some deliverability folks (like me!) call it DOI. When doing so, they refer to the same process of requiring an active response to the initial welcome or verification email.There are a lot of good reasons to implement COI/DOI, but today’s specific question is — does Germany “require” it? Ultimately this is a legal question, and I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not qualified to answer legal questions. So this is not legal…
Diego asks, “I want to find out from you if their is a script or software that one can use for warming up an IP. I will buy even if it’s not free.”Not only did Diego just write in with this question, but this topic came up when chatting with a potential client a few days ago. What can you do to shortcut or automate IP warming?The answer is: not much. IP warming, in its most basic definition, means building up your sending reputation through starting your dedicated IP address sending at low volume, and growing that send volume day-by-day for the first few weeks of sending. The gradual increase of volume from zero, plus sending wanted mail, is what dedicated IP senders need to do to build up long term inbox placement and deliverability success.A lot of different ESP platforms provide guidance on IP warming. At least one platform says…
Join us on April 4th, in a webinar put together by the Certified Senders Alliance:With an ever-changing #email environment and recent developments around privacy and security in the email space, it is worth taking a closer look at which insights and data are key for email performance. Special thanks to our speakers Marcel Becker and Al Iverson. Register now for the live event on 4 April. 👉👉https://buff.ly/3J6mEBg #CSALiveWebinars
Via the BBC comes the story of how a Norwegian computer expert has set up a website to allow people to mail random Russians to tell the story of the Ukraine war from a perspective not being covered in the Russian media. The website allows users to receive a random sampling of 150 Russian email addresses from a list compiled by the website operator, and it provides an email message for the user to send to those address, starting with the subject line “Ya vam ne vrag,” meaning “I am not your enemy,” and it goes on to explain the war from the perspective of most of the rest of the world, information Putin is not keen on Russian citizens having easy access to. Click through to read the story.Is it spam? Essentially, yes. Is it bad? That’s a more difficult judgement for me to make.
Over on his blog, John Levine explains why we couldn’t just delete all .ru domains (or .su domains or Russian IP addresses) from the internet. His is the practical take; why the generally open nature of internet routing and DNS means that any attempt to lock out Russia at that level would be nothing more than a very temporary and possibly only minor annoyance.
Dan Graham of Austin, TX has an interesting side hustle, going after telemarketers violating the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). I’m glad he’s doing it, but the problem with this sort of thing has got to be how time consuming it is. I already have a full time job, and I just can’t imagine the time and effort would take to actually sue these spammers in court.
It’s always good to check your email messages against the popular and free SpamAssassin spam filter (maybe even using my KBXSCORE tool?) to try to minimize your spam score. But sometimes the results can be cryptic, or you get a quite unexpected result. Understanding SpamAssassin’s feedback can sometimes be a bit of a challenge. You get a list of scoring keywords and perhaps a sentence or two about what each one means. But what if you need more? Check out what Deliverability Consultant Nicola Selenu has put together over on his Top Deliverability website: A list of all the SpamAssassin rules, with detailed descriptions and little code snippets showing you what words and tags the filter is often looking for! This is something that I’m definitely bookmarking for future reference. Thanks, Nicola, for compiling and sharing this! It might not make every single spam filter rule easier to understand, but more data leads…
Over on one of the forums the other day, somebody asked about best practices for redirects and link tracking for marketing email sends. Here’s a few of my thoughts.First: avoid the open redirect. If you’re using a redirect tool or feature that lets you just specify the full destination URL in its redirect, that’s bad news. Why? Because bad guys look for these to exploit. What happens is, when they’re used in spam or phishing emails, the domain reputation of the redirect domain goes bad, affected the domain that was abused, but protecting the bad guy’s actual domain. Spammers know this and look for opportunities to do this. Read more about this risk here.Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, here’s what I would call your best (safest) options for domain choice for link/click tracking:Your custom click-tracking domain hosted by your email service provider (ESP). Most ESP platforms…