Al Iverson
Bounce message. SMTP rejection. Deferral message. Non-delivery report (NDR). 5xx error. 4xx error. No matter what you call them, there are a zillion different kinds of them out there. Heck, Microsoft’s got at least four different ways to tell you “user unknown.” Memorizing all of these is hard. Probably impossible. So, if you’re looking for a big ole’ list of all (or at least most) of the different rejections or deferrals you can run into when sending emails to Microsoft, let’s be grateful that they’ve got a very handy chart that breaks down just about all of the different types of 4xx and 5xx responses you can receive when trying to send to Exchange Online / Office 365. There are close to 70 different types of NDRs listed; and it’s a good and handy resource that you should bookmark, though I admit that I don’t know if it covers absolutely
I have a gift for you this holiday season: A bonus mini-webinar, covering a topic that people keep asking me about: The List Unsubscribe header, and specifically, how does it work and what do platforms need to implement to be in compliance with the new 2024 Gmail and Yahoo sender requirements? It’s 23 minutes of … just me! Talking about list-unsub! Sorry, not sorry. I collected every single thing I could think of, everything I’ve read, tested myself, and even added a few things suggested by friends, and now you get me walking you through every single thing I can think of about the list-unsub header. Why a recorded webinar? It’s a bit of a test. I have a whole bunch of information that I wanted to share on the topic and I didn’t want to write a fifteen page blog post that surely nobody would slog their way through.
Why don’t ESPs warn you, when you’re putting your email together, when you’re about to send the test message, if DMARC is going to fail? It was perhaps considered optional in the past, but from 2024 onward, DMARC effectively becomes mandatory given Gmail and Yahoo’s new sender requirements. Thus, DMARC compliance (and success) has become more important than ever before. Which means that it’s time for sending platforms to start warning people, before somebody sends a big email campaign that’s going to fail DMARC. A big ole blinking “DMARC alert” warning, please and thank you! This is such a great idea that I am saddened that I didn’t think of it. All credit here goes to Big Jason Henderson, who posited that when trying to execute a test send, a warning should pop-up telling you if the send platform thinks a message is likely to fail DMARC, why that is
Validity (and before that, Return Path) has long offered access to various bits of reputation data to email users via DNS, primarily utilized via a particular SpamAssassin plugin. Checks include whether or not an IP address is on the Validity Certification whitelist, on the “Validity Safe” (aka Habeas) whitelist, or is on the “Validity RPBL” (Return Path Reputation Network Blacklist). Validity’s Tom Bartel recently posted to the Mailop list indicating upcoming changes/restrictions to that access, and I figured it would be good to pass that along here, to broaden the reach to help those who might miss this on Mailop. He writes: “I wanted to pass along an update regarding coming changes in 2024 to public query access for Validity reputation data in DNS. We’re finalizing implementation of necessary response codes (including in Spam Assassin) to enable this. It’s similar to the Spamhaus DQS changes a while ago. Any questions and/or
Wondering what the different restrictions and limits are on the free tier level available from various SMB-focused email service providers (ESPs) and newsletter tools? I was, too! Thankfully, “Intentionally simple email marketing and automation platform” Smaily put together a helpful chart that maps it out, and so I’m sharing it here, with their permission. (Having trouble reading the small type? Click on the graphic to enlarge it as desired.) Here are a couple of things to keep in mind: Of course, Smaily’s goal is to sell you on Smaily. I don’t know much about their platform and this is not an advertisement for that platform. Be sure to do your own research and testing. I will say that they were kind enough to put this chart together and allow me to share it here. I do appreciate them taking the time to pull this information together. It’s got a lot
Brian Krebs has a grand writeup on the new ICANN thingy (technical term) meant to help folks standardize requests for access to WHOIS data via a new “Registration Data Request Service” process. I’ll let Brian give you his good overview and history of what happened to WHOIS data (grr, GDPR!) and the negative impact it has had on good guys trying to track and stop bad guys. But at the end of the day, I have to express my doubt that it will actually result in additional meaningful access to WHOIS data. Registrars can opt-out, and there’s nothing here compelling a registrar to respond to certain requests in a certain way. This whole RDRS standardization could just make it easier for registrars to ignore data access requests. So…what was the point of this again? Read it here: ICANN Launches Service to Help With WHOIS Lookups
Sometimes I’ve got big data to share, and sometimes I don’t. Since I don’t have big data today, I thought it would be fun to pause and take a look at a small bit-o-data to see what we all can learn from it. In the graphic above, you can see a breakdown of the top domains and mailbox providers as measured from my tiny little Spam Resource newsletter list. Just under 800 subscribers at the moment. It’s a niche list and different people with different audiences are going to show a different breakdown of domains and providers, but still, I see a lot of the same domains and providers that other folks see. A few notes: I organized the data both by domain and by provider. See how this changes things. I guess my newsletter would pretty much count as a B2B newsletter, as my target audience is email senders
Mailchimp (now owned by Intuit) is hiring! You know who they are, the email marketing platform based in Atlanta and used all over the world to serve up newsletters and email marketing, used by many thousands of companies. “We’re looking for a Senior Deliverability Engineer who’s interested in learning how we work and contributing fresh ideas to the team. The ideal candidate is responsible for maintaining our sending code and should be able to read our PHP codebase as well as write and test code to push needed changes.” My two cents? Deep deliverability expertise and the ability to write code might make the role a bit of a unicorn (o hai) but I know there’s a number of us out there! And Mailchimp has some really smart people already, so you’d be in good company. Is this the right role for you? Click here for more information or to
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