Al Iverson

Wow! This is pretty cool. Ron Amadeo from ARS Technica reports on a significant, AI-based spam filter update at Gmail. Gmail can now understand “adversarial text manipulations” using a new mechanism called RETVec (Resilient & Efficient Text Vectorizer), meaning that it basically renders graphics of everything written to compare it all for spam classification purposes, based on the words and other bits extracted from the message, basically regardless of how they’re encoded. Using emojis to trick people in spam, because writing something it out in words will get you blocked? That might not fly now. Using cyrillic characters (that look visually similar to a user but look different to a text classifier) to try to skate by Gmail filters and hide the nature of what you’re sending? Nuh-uh. (Interestingly, I’ve known for a while now that Gmail can take issue with certain special characters or emojis in certain places in

GPT — Google Postmaster Tools (or Gmail Postmaster Tools) is a truly handy thing for email senders, especially email marketers who need data and deliverability monitoring. It is a reputation dashboard that pulls together IP address reputation, domain reputation, bounce and complaint metrics, and more, all in one handy interface. GPT is domain-based, meaning that you configure it to provide you data on either your return-path or visible from domain, authenticated by way of SPF and DKIM. You tell GPT which domains you want to monitor, and you then prove that you own or have admin access to each given domain by implementing a key string in a TXT record to demonstrate that ownership. Deliverability consultants and marketing managers can use the data to great success — showing proof that whatever changes (strategic, technical, segmentation, etc.) made to a marketing program are showing improvement as measured by the good/bad reputation

Did you know? You can sign up for a free att.net email account right this very second! And it’ll cost you nothing at all! I signed up for one myself, and it was a perfectly fine and easy process. Why would you want to do this? AT&T makes note of, the mailbox comes “in partnership” with Yahoo Mail, making it easy to assume that this is just a Yahoo Mail account with the att.net domain. But, those of us deliverability nerds out there remember that AT&T has some extra filtering here and there, before passing messages off to Yahoo. Or they used to. Do they still? The MX record for the various AT&T domains points to a different mail gateway — not the normal Yahoo Mail one. So the infrastructure configuration certainly implies that there could be some filtering happening a bit differently for an att.net mailbox versus a “regular”

Just a quick post for today, with a couple of random bits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud (aka ExactTarget) info. These have been sitting in my notes for a while, and since I’ve got nothing else Marketing Cloud related to share right now, I figured I’d wrap them up into this tiny little post right here. First, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has an email validation API. Did you know? I didn’t know. Let’s take a look at what the documentation says it can do. The “Validate Email” API has multiple criteria (validators): SyntaxValidator, MXValidator, and ListDetectiveValidator. One assumes syntax validator is a format checker. The reference to List Detective implies that the address is checked to see if its username or domain matches against the List Detective filtering list, meaning that Marketing Cloud would reject import of the address under normal circumstances. The MX Validator, I assume, is some sort of DNS

From 1997-2016, Ken Magill covered the wild and woolly happenings of online marketing (and email marketing) from its nearly nascent beginnings through to the world-changing behemoth it would become. From DM News, to Magilla Marketing, to the Magill Report, Ken worked hard to provide “the real stories behind the PR nonsense,” keeping us updated on online and email marketing industry changes, and calling bullshit as appropriate, as “Marketing’s Weekly Dose of the Truth.”  In October 2023, he published his memoir: There, He’s Crying. There, He’s Crying: A Memoir, by Ken Magill [ Buy now: Amazon | Bookshop ] Ken Magill is quick to let me know that he grew up in a different time. Out with the other kids all day long, shooting crabapples at each other, mom has no idea where you are, you’re out on your own with your friends, fending for yourselves, and everything’s just fine. He compares

Google first warned earlier this year that they’re going to retire accounts that haven’t been accessed at all in the past two years. This affects Gmail accounts — if nobody’s home, no emails have been read, nothing’s going on, Google is now likely to shut down that account. They warned us that the soonest they would start shutting down accounts is December 2023. Well, December is now here. What should we do about it? If you’re a Google user and don’t want to lose that Gmail account, or lose any other data that may be associated with your Google account (files, photos, etc.), Google explained in a recent notification what you can do to make sure that Google continues to denote your account as active. In short? Log in, poke at something. Reply to an email. Edit a file. Show a sign of life. If you’re an email newsletter or email

Hey, people were freaking out five years ago about how Mailchimp was for sure going to shut down email newsletter service TinyLetter. It turns out that the concern was prescient, though just a bit premature. Here we are, five years later, and now Mailchimp has just announced that it is shutting down TinyLetter at the end of February, 2024.  Mailchimp sent the following announcement to TinyLetter users on Wednesday, November 29th: In 2011, Mailchimp acquired a small newsletter service called TinyLetter to expand our offerings and make it easy for people to send updates, digests, and dispatches to their fans and friends. Over the years, TinyLetter took on a life of its own, and we’ve loved watching you share your work and build communities around your newsletters. Since then, our business priorities have evolved, and we’ve been laser focused on building tools to serve marketers and help small businesses grow.

American broadband communications provider Sparklight, aka Cable One, provides service to 1.1 million residential and business customers across 24 states. However, as of July 14, 2022, they no longer provide email service to residential customers. The affected domains are: cableone.net newwavecom.net nwcable.net mycitycable.com Consider them all dead; the MX for these domains is no longer answering on port 25. [ H/T: Evan Burke. ]

Gmail has very recently unveiled a series of new deferral/rejection messages. You’ll want to familiarize yourself with the following Gmail rejection messages: 421 4.7.28 Our system has detected an unusual rate of unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily rate limited. Please visit https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedRateLimitError to review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. – gsmtp 421 4.7.28 Gmail has detected an unusual rate of unsolicited mail containing one of your URL domains. To protect our users from spam, mail with the URL has been temporarily rate limited. Please visit  https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedRateLimitError  to review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. – gsmtp 421 4.7.28 Gmail has detected an unusual rate of unsolicited mail originating from your SPF domain. To protect our users from spam, mail sent from your domain has been temporarily rate limited. Please visit  https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedRateLimitError  to review our

What do you do when you’re a newsletter publisher or marketing manager sending emails to your list and you run into deliverability trouble through no fault of your own? How do you even know? It’s a tricky and sticky situation and I’ve seen it happen more than once lately, and across more than one email service provider (ESP). The assumption, most of the time, is that if a mailbox provider — say, Gmail, decides to put your mail in the spam folder, that it’s a reflection of the quality of your mail — not a reflection of the provider or any issue the provider might be having. Ninety-seven percent of the time, it’s all about the (sending) client, not the sending platform. But sometimes it is actually a problem related to the sending platform. And that’s not an easy thing to measure. But it’s a good thing to ask your