Al Iverson
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!
Hey, Klaviyo users! Did you miss the recent “INTRO TO DELIVERABILITY” webinar presented by yours truly along with Tonya Gordon from Klaviyo? In the webinar, we talked about the basics of deliverability, the top things a Klaviyo sender can do to maximize their chances of deliverability success, and we answered a bunch of your questions. Don’t despair if you weren’t there to experience it live — we’ve recorded the whole thing and put it online over at the Kickbox blog, so you can catch up on it at your leisure. Click on through to read more.
This is a question I get a lot. Does Gmail use any blocklists? Or, somebody will tell me that they’re having Gmail issues, and they’ve plugged their own IP address into an online blocklist lookup tool, and they are sure that any results found (blocklisting issues) must somehow be part of the underlying cause of their deliverability woes. Except, that’s just about never the case. Here’s why.There are a zillion blocklists out there. Speaking specifically just about DNSBLs (IP-based blocking lists), there’s a good 90+ of them. But blocklists are a bit like blogs, in that anybody can publish them and the fact that it’s been published doesn’t mean that anybody is guaranteed to be actually looking at the what has been published. The net here is that there are a lot of blocklists that, if your IP or domain ends up listed by them, this does not mean that
Italiaonline/Libero Mail is having inbound email issues, impeding attempts to send mail to the domains libero.it, virgilio.it, inwind.it, iol.it and blu.it. Senders are reporting various 4xx SMTP delays and timeouts when attempting to connect. Either small amounts of mail or no amounts of mail are getting through currently (it’s not clear to me which). This appears to have been ongoing since Sunday evening, local time. Italiaonline is aware of the issue and is working to resolve it, reporting here that “We have been working tirelessly for several hours now to solve an unexpected and unforeseen infrastructural problem.”You can follow them on Facebook here, if you’d like to watch for updates.
Axios, the Washington Post, and others are reporting that the Gmail political email pilot program is coming to an end.Axios buries the lede on this one — putting the important bit (to me) at the very end: “Google’s pilot email program, which saw more than 100 political committees participate, will end January 31, and the company is evaluating next steps.”More from the Washington Post: “The company will let the program sunset at the end of January instead of prolonging it, Google’s lawyers said in a filing on Monday.” The filing is an attempt to get the RNC “unfair spam filtering” lawsuit against Google dismissed. How the shutdown of the pilot program ties to that effort, I am not equipped enough to say at the moment, but I’ll be curious to learn more.
Here’s an easy tip that I wanted to share with everyone. It’s something I knew about myself but didn’t take into consideration (I guess I got tripped up in my own “do as I say, not as I do” kind of thing). As mentioned, recently I set up my own mailbox provider to host my own mail, and as part of that, I set up a new domain name. (I didn’t HAVE to set up a new domain name, but it made setup a bit easier; I could dedicate the whole domain to my new project, and I could simply jettison the domain if I decide to shut the service down later.)I set the server up and tried sending the first few test messages, and immediately started to see Spamhaus blocks. The error messages basically said something like “mail blocked due to domain being listed on zrd.dq.spamhaus.net.” ZRD? A quick
Multiple folks are reporting Gmail delivery issues today — both “571” style spam bounce blocks and spam folder placement. Some of the affected folks seem to be sending corporate mail, outbound from Proofpoint or Microsoft O365 hosted environments. It happens to some folks from time to time, but there are enough reports of it out in the wild that I think that perhaps Google released a significant Gmail filter update within the past 1-3 days and that it might be a bit buggy. It already sounds like some of those same folks are now seeing improvement. If you’re affected, be sure to submit sample messages via the Gmail Sender Contact Form — though they do not always respond, they do review every ticket, and in a scenario like this, sending them data and feedback is important. (Click here to learn more about that sender form process.)Of course, you need to
The other day, I ran across a complaint on Linkedin. “Just saw another email go to the Promotions Folder with DKIM, SPF, and DMARC set up perfectly. Stop telling people this will fix their e-mail problems!” It’s not the first time I’ve heard this, and I can understand why the author is frustrated. But, it’s important not to miss the true point — email authentication will help to improve inbox delivery. Because it does! But there’s a nuanced explanation to go along with that. The devil truly is in the details.Email authentication is fantastic. SPF and DKIM both allow you to set yourself up as YOU in the eyes of mailbox providers — as opposed to just being one of the many clients of ESP or CRM platform X, based on a shared IP address or shared DKIM domain. This is a good thing, but it’s just the start.Setting yourself