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Here’s a bonus Salesforce Marketing Cloud tip for those SFMC users out there in Spam Resource land. Wondering how to configure the Reply Mail Management reply handling functionality? If so, very smart SFMC wizard Donna Redmond has got just what you need: a blog post (and a package manager and video) that explain what you can do with this functionality, and how to configure it. Check it out here.
Google’s Gmail might be the preeminent mailbox provider. Launched in 2004, Gmail has grown from the “new kid on the block” into one of the biggest hosts of individual email mailboxes in the world. Depending on what data you look at, you might even see Gmail as the #1 mailbox provider, at least here in the US. Gmail’s spam filtering systems incorporate user feedback and engagement. And they know what they’re doing. If you are not sending wanted mail to people who requested that mail and who read that mail at high enough percentages, you’re going to struggle. You won’t reliably get your mail to the inbox. Their systems are too good — their magic spam fighting robots look at metrics very closely — and their view of certain metrics can even change over time! What got you to the inbox in 2019 might not be good enough to get
Successful inbox delivery to Microsoft consumer mailboxes (referred to as Outlook.com, Hotmail.com, or Microsoft “OLC”) can be tricky. Any deliverability consultant will tell you that Microsoft is often the quickest to block or junk your mail, and that it is relatively common to have deliverability issues at Microsoft only, and nowhere else. You are not alone.Not only can Microsoft often be “quicker on the trigger” when it comes to blocking, but also, resolution of deliverability issues can take longer here versus other mailbox providers. It’s not always clear what triggers spam folder placement or blocking — but like with so many other mailbox providers, the best thing you can do to minimize deliverability risk is to send truly wanted mail. No purchased lists, no email appends, no ten year old lists you found in the back of a filing cabinet. Sending engaging, wanted, recognized mail, is going to be your
Jeff Butts from Mac Observer walks you through how to send an email using Apple’s “Hide My Email” functionality from your iOS device.Neat idea…except that it doesn’t seem to work for me, on my iPhone 12 Mini running iOS 15.4.1. I just get an error message that says, “Hide my Email is currently unavailable.” Apparently, I’m not the only one. Is this feature perhaps a bit buggy?
The intent behind DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) is to give a domain owner insight into who is sending mail using their domain and allow that domain owner to define a policy to tell ISPs what to do with mail that purports to be from them but doesn’t pass authentication checks (usually meaning that said mail is fraudulent). There’s a strong implication here that this is a domain level setting, it’s something that you would do at the highest possible level for your domain. Meaning here, I’d set a DMARC policy for spamresource.com, not for subdomains like newsletter.spamresource.com or email.spamresource.com. And generally speaking, that’s what you should do. It’s what I (usually) do.But what if you want to get granular and do this differently with one or more (or all) subdomains of your domain name? Here are some options.Do nothing (at the subdomain level). Maybe you’ll set a…
Here’s a neat unix/linux email trick: How to get notified via email for SSH logins, courtesy of Tech Republic’s Jack Wallen. And it uses your Gmail account to send the mail, like I offered up back in 2020 (great minds think alike). You don’t NEED to implement that step if your server has a good email sending reputation and history already, but if you don’t — if the server hardly sends any mail at all, you’re not sure if DKIM or DMARC is set up properly, etc., then sending via Gmail is a great way to do it, letting you bypass IP warming, reputation and authentication configuration issues. Anyway, beyond that, the core of the notification setup itself is pretty simple. Click on through to see how it is configured.
You should read: This great blog post from Oracle’s Daniel Deneweth. In it, he explains that BIMI is “the carrot to get email marketing managers to fully authenticate” their email messages, and what that means — explaining the primary benefits of BIMI, what ISPs support it currently, and providing guidance on how to get up and running with a BIMI logo. The steps are broken down and easy to digest. You should bookmark it!
You’ll recall me warning recently that using Spamhaus data to protect your mail server is a bad idea if you’re using open or public DNS resolvers. TL;DR? Spamhaus is worried about too much traffic via public channels but blocking is implemented in a way that makes it effectively intermittent and potentially confusing. You could be fine for weeks and then suddenly you start bouncing all inbound mail accidentally. Or you could be querying a resolver that never shows ANY bad IPs to block, losing you out on the good spam filtering benefit that you were hoping for.Here’s what to do about that.No matter how you implement DNSBL usage, check your logs periodically. In the case of Spamhaus, look for the “127.255.255” response codes. That will indicate that your attempt to query Spamhaus data is being blocked, so you’ve got a problem. That problem is probably interfering with the delivery of…
How do I use OpenDKIM with multiple domain names on a single postfix server? That’s a question I myself had when I first set up my current VPS to host my current email system. So I searched around a bit. I found this guide, but it’s kind of a pain in the rear. Too much heavy lifting.So I tried this instead. It’s a bit of a hacker trick nobody seems to mention online: In your opendkim.conf file, where you specify the domain, you can just include multiple domains here, separated by commas.Instead ofdomain example.comJust putdomain example.com,example.org,mydomain3.comIn your opendkim.conf file.Upside: Super easy.Downside: All domains have to share the same DKIM key, because there’s only one DKIM key setting in opendkim.conf.It works fine. Though you specify the domain name when creating a DKIM key, there’s nothing in the key that is actually domain-specific. At scale, this is insecure. At the hobbyist level, where…
Looking for guidance on how to create your BIMI logo file? Valimail has a pretty good guide that explains the requirements and they also explain what to keep in mind when creating your BIMI graphic SVG file. Starting with:SquareSVG Tiny Portable/Secure formatSolid backgroundPublished via HTTPSSVG meaning a Scalable Vector Graphics file, and particular type of SVG called SVG Tiny Portable/Secure (SVG P/S). The image has to truly be a vector graphic; the overall SVG spec does allow you to embed a bitmap in a file but this isn’t allowed for SVG P/S or BIMI usage.The Valimail guide goes on to explain how to manually edit the SVG file to convert it to the SVG P/S spec. But if you don’t feel like editing XML files by hand, download this converter application that the BIMI (AuthIndicators) Working Group has shared here. I’ve used the Macintosh version and it works fine. (You…