microsoft
(Here’s an updated version of a post from way back in 2018, with additional resources! I hope you find it handy.)Need a tool to parse message headers? Trying to break down how long it took to hand off an email message between servers? Want to check for blocklistings, content scoring or link issues? Here’s a few different tools that do a few different things.First, let’s check message headers using this tool from Google, or this (I think unofficial) version for Microsoft headers. Both do basically the same thing — you paste in the email headers and it will parse them, giving you a breakdown of how much time it took between each server hop. Very handy for troubleshooting delivery delays. Did a Gmail server hold on to your message for four hours before passing it on? Or did it never leave your ESP’s mail server? That’s what tools like these…
Check it out! It looks like Microsoft has updated SNDS to provide a bit more info than they provided previously. In the “Comments” column, they’re now including snapshot counts of spam complaints received for that IP address at various points throughout the day.Where it says 10 complaints at 4:30 pm and 18 complaints at 4:37 pm, I think that means that eight complaints came in between 4:30 and 4:37. Might that be useful for folks looking to better identify which sends at which time are generating the most complaints?Note: It appears that the date/time in that comments field is when the complaint occurred, not when the campaign was sent. I’ve seen at least one example where that complaint date in the comments is a few days after the campaign send date. I suspect that could cause a bit of confusion.[ H/T: Mawutor Amesawu and Jennifer Nespola Lantz ]
It’s time for your periodic BIMI adoption status update. A quick overview of what this is all about: BIMI is a standard being adopted by multiple internet services providers (ISPs) to allow the display of a sender’s logo along side email messages, when displayed on a mobile device or in a webmail client. Some ISPs and mail clients have had a sender logo display function for a while now (one example is Gravatar), but BIMI is an attempt to standardize and regulate this mechanism across the email ecosystem.Adoption by senders seems a bit slow; but the spec only went public in 2019, which isn’t that long ago. Also, it suffers a bit from the “chicken and egg” problem — it’s hard to convince senders to adopt the standard if receivers haven’t adopted support for the standard. But now with two of the top three B2C mailbox providers (Yahoo and Gmail) having BIMI support, I’m…
You did it! You got Yahoo or Microsoft to unblock you. Perhaps you even figured out why they “hate” you. Perhaps your friendly neighborhood deliverability consultant just closed the ticket you submitted, letting you know that the ISP has unblocked your sending IP address and telling you that you should now be “good to go.”So…now what? What should you do next? What should you send, how much, in what order? What’s the best way to ramp things back up? This seems something that is missing from a lot of deliverability consultation — the “now what?” after getting you unblocked. I sense an opportunity! Allow me to share my take on what you should do next, after getting unblocked by an ISP like Yahoo or Microsoft.WAIT. Wait a period of time — 24 hours if Yahoo, 48 hours if Microsoft, before doing any significant sending. (For other ISPs, wait until the…
(You might notice that this is a slightly-modified repost of previous content. It was necessary to deal with Blogger suddenly taking issue with a post containing a giant list of domains. Whoops.)Looking to segment your email database based on ISP? Want to break out separate content or timing for Yahoo Mail versus Microsoft OLC versus Gmail subscribers? I’ve got you covered. Click here to download the full “MAGY” (Microsoft, AOL, Gmail, Yahoo) domain list, and feel free to use it for email segmentation. (And please don’t use it for spammy purposes.)
It’s been a while since I’ve posted a BIMI status update, and things are changing! Things are standardizing! Things are getting good. So, let’s get right to it…