Word to the Wise
It’s been a few years since we’ve actually made it to a MAAWG. We missed much of 2018 and 2019 due to our international move. Then 2020 San Francisco conflicted with a personal engagement. Then, well, pandemic hit and it’s been virtual and then we were moving and … wow, it’s been busy! We did make it to London, though, and have started reconnecting with colleagues new and old. We also got a chance to take a trip down the river over the weekend leading to a chance to get some pretty pictures. Blues and Whites Tower Bridge south tower. Look, Kids! Big Ben! London old and new After a day of touristing, we’re now buckling down to do some hard work. Steve’s doing a training session this afternoon and I’m moderating a panel tomorrow. I’m so excited to be back in person learning from my colleagues. Don’t forget to
I don’t send a lot of spam complaints generally. Mostly I block and move on. There are some companies, though, that I offer the professional courtesy of sending a complaint or a report to their abuse@ address. Former clients, friends and colleagues generally get that courtesy. The number of ESPs that completely fail to take any action is disappointing. Too many of them can’t even manage the simple courtesy of removing addresses. A few don’t even process bounces correctly and continue to send mail even when getting a spam block or 550 user unknown. Sometimes I’ll reach out to folks who I know work at particular ESPs, although that’s less common these days as everyone seems to be moving companies and I can’t keep track. Often I get an invite to “always send me complaints directly.” That … is not a solution, people. Expecting people who are reporting spam to…
Another day, another ESP telling a client to publish a SPF include for the wrong domain. It shouldn’t annoy me, really. It’s mostly harmless and it’s just an extra DNS look up for most companies. Heck, we followed Mailchimp’s advice and added their include to our bare root domain and it’s not really a huge deal for companies with only a couple SaaS providers. Still, it’s an incorrect recommendation and it does cause problems for some senders who are using multiple SaaS providers and Google. Both Steve and I have written different posts about SPF over the years. In fact, the Authenticating with SPF: -all or ~all post is the most visited post on the blog. I’ve even written almost this same post, pointing out that a lot of ESPs have bad recommendations for SPF records. Steve’s written about the technical ins and outs of SPF records in DNS and…
Every once in a while we’ll see a rejection from Yahoo that says RFCs 554 5.0.0 Message not accepted due to failed RFC compliance. What does that mean and what can we do about it? It really does mean exactly what it says on the label: there’s something about the message that is not in compliance with any number of RFCs and are not going to accept the message in its current state. When trying to help a colleague diagnose the issue I came up with a list of things to check. Troubleshooting in the email Is there any high ASCII without quoted printable or Base64 encoding in the body or the headers?Is there a Date header? Is there any duplication in header fields?Is there a bare IP address in a link somewhere?Are the line lengths inside the message shorter than 998 characters?Are lines correctly terminated with CR/LF?Is the DKIM…
Tools that you run from the command line – i.e. from a terminal or shell window – are often more powerful and quicker to use than their GUI or web equivalents. Their output is plain text so it’s much easier to copy and paste into an email or a slack conversation – sure, you can take a screenshot of a GUI tool and share that, but then the folks you’re sharing it with can’t copy the text out of it. And you can easily run them on a remote machine, which can be particularly useful when you’re diagnosing network issues, or email reputation issues that may be IP address based. Here are some of the tools I use daily, and how to install them on your laptop. (If you’re installing these for a class I’m giving we might have an alternate way to use them if you didn’t install them…
There comes a time in many marketers’ lives where they are faced with and old, stale database and a management chain that wants to mail those addresses. Smart marketers know that delivery problems will arise if they just reactivate all those users. They also know that mailing older addresses can affect current and engaged addresses as well. Still, many executives think there is no downside to mailing old addresses. A long time ago I wrote 5 answers you need before mailing old addresses, which covers a lot of the underlying things to consider first. What it doesn’t do is talk about how to mail them. Management will know all those things and still decide that sending to old addresses is a good idea. So, now what? A lot of folks just run the list through a data hygiene service. But, to my mind, most data hygiene services don’t address the…
A while back I wrote about Apple Mail Privacy Protection, what it does and how it works. Since MPP was first announced I’d assumed that it would be built on the same infrastructure as iCloud Private Relay, Apple’s VPN product, but hadn’t seen anything from Apple to explicitly connect the two and didn’t have access to enough data to confirm it independently. But the nice folks at MailChimp did gather enough image load data to confirm that the two are related, and prompted me to look into Private Relay a bit more. Apple have a nice description of Private Relay from the consumer perspective in their support pages, but the interesting bits are in their technical info for network admins. Their description there matches my black box testing of MPP image loads exactly, but the bit that clinches it is the directions for how enterprise networks can block private relay…
You’ve probably heard about Apple Mail Privacy Protection. Email marketing chat has been all a-twitter about it since it was announced in June. Skipping over all the “Openpocalypse” panic, what is it and what does it do? Image Loads It’s all about images in email and how they’re loaded (particularly invisible one pixel images that are used solely for tracking). Why do we care about image loads? Email marketers and ESPs have used the metadata included with image loads for years to grab information and metrics from their recipients. By using a unique name for an image they can tell when a particular recipient loads that image. That image load correlated with a particular recipient is what ESPs describe as “an Open”, and it means that means the sender knows the recipient read the email. They’ll often use an invisible, single pixel image that can be easily added to every…
A lot of folks are talking about Apple’s recent announcement about building privacy protection into email. I have somewhat stayed out of the conversation and I’m not sure what I really think about it. This is a change to how a lot of folks use email and no one really likes change. I actually have a post I’ve been quietly working on talking about open rates. From my perspective, they’re an increasingly useless metric for deliverability and too many senders put too much emphasis on them and they’re not telling us what we think they’re telling us. I might work a little bit more on that, but at this point it kinda feels moot given Apple’s new announcement. I do have some thoughts and opinions on the Apple change but I’m still thinking about it and looking at the longer term implications. I know there’s a rush to be the…
(Copied and lightly edited from a Facebook post) It occurred to me as I was commenting elsewhere that there is a lot of confusion about domains / subdomains and where they’re used in emails.I get confused when people talk about ‘domain reputation’ because I have at least 4 distinct places where domains show up in an email that heavily influence delivery. But a lot of other folks talk about domain reputation as a single thing. I can never work out which place they’re talking about and thus find it difficult to comment on the domain reputation. Domain Types: SPF domainDKIM domainVisible From domainURL / Image hosting domains SPF is the Envelope From / Return Path / Bounce domain / 5321.from. The end user does not see this domain unless they go look for it. It is the domain that is checked by SPF and the one that must match the…