Al Iverson
Today’s guest post comes from Sebastian Kluth of the Certified Senders Alliance. This is cross-posted from Linkedin, with his permission. Thanks, Sebastian, for helping encourage us to start thinking about the possibilities for the future evolution of bounces! (And click here to learn more about the Certified Senders Alliance.)Bounces are a primary KPI and measurement unit in email marketing and email deliverability. A bounce provides delivery status notifications (DSNs – see RFC 3463).Basically, when we talk about bounces, we are thinking of the following standard definitions:Hard Bounce: a permanent delivery failure due to an invalid email address or non-existing domain name.Soft Bounce: a temporary delivery failure due to a full inbox, server downtime, or the message size exceeding limits.Very straightforward, very top level and very technical. The idea behind sending bounces was to inform the sending MTA about the delivery status to the recipient MTA via SMTP. SMTP status codes were
Do you receive political spam? Political spam happens in the US, seemingly regardless of party, but it is not something universally engaged in, nor do I think that it is something broadly welcomed, even if some tolerate it.My own personal experience is varied. Back in my Miami Beach days, I dared to sign up for local government LISTSERVs to get warnings about hurricanes (when should we leave town?) and notifications of upcoming events in the area where I lived (where’s the live jazz?). A number of unscrupulous folks seem to have obtained my email address from those signups via FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests and then added me to lists for their various candidacies. I vigorously reported all of those unsolicited messages, knowing that most best practice-abiding email sending platforms do not intend to allow lists to be built in this way, and specific mail stopped. Sometimes an overzealous candidate
A friend of mine posted about going to see the bands Charlatans UK and Ride here in Chicago a few days ago. It made me jealous and got me thinking about Ride, a band I used to really enjoy back in the 1990s. Here’s their single “Leave Them All Behind” from their 1992 album “Going Blank Again.” Shoegazing at its finest! Enjoy.
Google Postmaster Tools, the very handy domain reputation dashboard provided free of charge from the folks behind Gmail, is having trouble right now. Since at least early afternoon on Thursday, February 9th, users have been greeted with an eternal spinning wheel after logging in. A few folks have suggested that hitting refresh a bunch of times might get you past this, but I wasn’t able to have any luck with that myself. Thus, if you’re experiencing trouble with GPT at the moment, know that it’s not just you, and I’m sure Google is working on getting everything back up and running as soon as possible.
DELIVTERMS: The (more or less) regular series here on Spam Resource that defines deliverability terminology. Unlike some other series out there in the world, this one has neither hot questions nor even hotter wings. But I do hope to help shore up gaps in your email and deliverability-related knowledge. Today, I’m going to talk about MTAs and MUAs, mail transfer agents, and mail user agents.MTA means “Mail Transfer Agent.” The acronym MTA is basically interchangeable with the term “mail server.” An MTA or mail server is an software application running as server software to handle processing and transmission/receipt of email messages. It’s an MTA that responds to a connection on port 25 and answers with “220” and an SMTP banner and accepts or sends inbound or outbound email, transmitted via SMTP. When I look up the MX record for a domain, and I connect to port 25 of that MX
Here’s an updated version of a guide I put together back in 2016 to help folks understand how the list-unsubscribe functionality works on Apple Mail on iOS.It was back in 2016 that we learned that Apple planned to add list-unsubscribe support to Apple’s iOS email client, and that support came with iOS 10. Many ESPs have long supported a special header, the “list unsubscribe” header. Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Outlook.com, along with some other email clients or platforms, look for this header, and if it is found, they’ll put some sort of prominent “unsubscribe” link or button in a special place in their user interface. At Gmail, in particular, this header tends to show only for “good” senders, so if you’re a sender and you do see this extra unsubscribe link when sending to Gmail subscribers, know that Gmail probably considers your mail stream to be a wanted and safe one.
Hey, Al! My company has sent approximately 200,000 email messages in the past month to Yahoo! Mail recipients, but we haven’t received even a single complaint back via our ISP Feedback Loop. Is that normal?No, that is not normal! If you’re sending mail en masse, you’re going to get some non-zero number of complaints back. Even if it’s all fantastically opt-in and there’s no chance of somebody getting an unwanted email message, Yahoo’s ISP Feedback Loop, which they call the Complaint Feedback Loop, is always going to faithfully report along any complaints it is given, and that always will include a low number of complaints from people who truly did sign up for the email message. (Keeping in mind that a complaint isn’t what kills your deliverability dead; it’s a high number or high percentage of complaints that does it.)Thus, I suspect something is broken. Probably something on this checklist:You’re not
Multiple folks are warning that internet security company Cyren is on the verge of shutting down. The company itself has not exactly said this, but reading between the lines, it seems inevitable; just about all staff laid off, and smart industry folks warning that while servers are up for now, if something were to break, there’s probably nobody left on the payroll to fix it. Cyren is broadly used for spam/content filtering and if your company or mailbox provider utilizes Cyren for inbound spam/security filtering of email, they’re probably scrambling to find an alternate solution. Indeed, one mailbox provider I’ve talked to today is in this exact position, seeing how quickly they can migrate away from the use of Cyren services. Threat intelligence and spam filtering requires that filter rules and fingerprints be updated automatically and periodically, both to capture new threats and address potential false positives. Assuming that there’s nobody
This is one of those things that a client learned about the hard way, so I wanted to share with you all with the hope that you can avoid some of the same pain that they, and I, experienced, while helping them troubleshoot this issue.Avoid including emojis in the friendly from field.The friendly from is not exactly a header, but it’s part of the from header, the text that goes along with your from email address. (Learn more about what it the friendly from is here.) People love to customize the friendly from to various ends: it could be an effort to drive better recognition of their brand, it could be to suggest a personal connection between sender and recipient, or it could be something done to help drive more sales. Or maybe sometimes you might even modify it just to look cool. That’s okay; we’ve all done it.But what you
My Kickbox colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz has put together the ultimate guide to email headers. It’s the perfect place to start to learn more about what email headers are, what is in them, and how you can use them for deliverability troubleshooting. This kind of expertise is what makes her a great deliverability consultant and we are lucky that she loves to share that expertise with us!Here’s links to all four entries in the “Guide to Email Headers Series,” all found over on the Kickbox blog.Part 1: What are email headers? What are email headers, how are they used, and how to find them?Part 2: Why are email headers important? 4 ways email headers can answer your deliverability issuesPart 3: How do I read email headers? General guidelinesPart 4: Email headers you should know: 13 Email Headers That Can Identify Deliverability IssuesLearn and enjoy!