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IPv4 IP address space is just about used up, as the unused pool of IP addresses waited to be doled out is no more. And practically speaking, almost all email sending lives in IPv4 space. (That’s an oversimplification — a few ISPs do support it, but frankly, I would not call it broad.) I’d even say that most email sending platforms – email service providers (ESPs), customer relationship management (CRM) software, Marketing Clouds, email automation tools and the like, very few of these support sending mail over IPv6. So when it comes to email and email deliverability, the discussion is almost singularly about IPv4. Spammers and scammers need lots of IP addresses. Throughout the modern history of email, most spam filtering and blocking of badness was based on identifying that badness at the IP address level. Meaning bad guys doing bad things with an IP address find it blocked and

One assumes the rendering tools like Email on Acid and Litmus have already been updated with this new desktop client, the Outlook for Windows email app that just launched, since it has been available in a public preview since May 2022.If you’re a Windows user, you’re longing for a desktop email client, and you want a new email client, Microsoft’s got you covered. Reports say that this new Outlook for Windows application will eventually replace the built-in Windows Mail and Calendar app. But if you’re curious and want to try it now, just after its official release, click on through.Read more here.

Apologies for the clickbait headline! I couldn’t resist. My intent is to deceive, but only slightly. What is this all about? I was just reading Brian Krebs and his excellent recent reporting, summarizing and analyzing of data from The Interisle Consulting Group, which shows that domains in the “.us” TLD are amazingly prevalent in BEC (business email compromise/aka “phishing”) scams.What this has to do with deliverability is this: while in theory deliverability based on domain reputation is based on the send stats linked to your domain name, your choice of domain can indeed matter to some degree, because spam filters react to what they see. Some might do so with bayesian filtering, some might be manual rulesets updated by a person, or it could be some fancy new artificial intelligence coming to take our jobs someday (yay, Skynet!) — but any of them could, and some likely will, treat mail from domains

Madighan Ryan, writing for EarthTalk, ponders the question — what impact does email spam have on the environment? After all, all that server time to process, filter and reject unwanted messages takes electricity and power isn’t free, in the terms of either money or environment consequences. Read more here.

The Verge reports on a new change announced by Google: There’s now a good chance they’ll ask you to verify your login when you change certain Gmail settings, adjusting things like IMAP email access or adding email forwarding to a new address. Here’s the details from Google. This is a good thing, meant to prevent stealth account takeovers where you might think everything is fine, but a bad actor could be siphoning mail away without the account’s owner realizing what’s going on. I’m sure it’s going to annoy me, though, since I have a zillion Gmail accounts all with various settings around forwarding and IMAP that I am often modifying. But, I’ll happily put up with it in the name of making Gmail a more secure platform for users.[ H/T: Jennifer Nespola Lantz ]

Yes, we know: August is the month when marketers take a well-deserved break. But before you go off on your holidays, here’s a recap of all the new developments and functions we’ve launched this summer Unified contact management Coming up at the end of August, a new interface for managing all your email and SMS contacts on a single page, all together and faster. The new function allows you to access information on your contacts, such as registration status, telephone number and email address, from a single access point, easier, better and faster. This means you can check whether contacts are present in your list of email or SMS contacts, change their registration status, and access information on them, all from the same place. Where to find the function and how to use it Just go to the Recipients section of the menu and click on All. You can now

Here’s the tiniest bit of happy news after a week of FTC compliance actions, DNS downtimes and blocklist glitches: Hormel, makers of the beloved food known as SPAM, have kindly donated more than a million dollars worth of the stuff to help Maui wildfire victims. Here’s coverage from NBC News and here’s an announcement from Hormel themselves.

When I talk about email typos to a marketing audience, I sometimes get a mixed response. Yeah, typos lead to mail to spamtraps, and spamtraps can have some impact on deliverability, but are they really that bad? Who cares if my marketing e-flyer goes to the wrong address? I know, I know, I need to worry about engagement and inbox placement, but it’s not like national security is at stake. Or is it?See, there’s a whole other side to the problem of typo addresses, typo domains, and spamtraps. The issue is that marketers aren’t the only people sending to wrong addresses. Do you know how many people sign up with a social media account using the wrong email address? Tons! TONS!!! People typo their own email address constantly. When registering for Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Tumblr, Livejournal, and all the other sites you’ve never heard of. And that’s just on the

The poop emoji has been in the news a lot lately, thanks to Elon Musk setting up an auto-response to any emails sent to Twitter’s press contact address that contains nothing but the swirling brown icon. Don’t believe me? Email press@twitter.com and see for yourself.But that’s “only the tip of a brown iceberg,” as it seems to have gotten Sarah Jeong thinking, how do the courts handle the poop emoji? How often does the poop emoji show up in filings? She’ll answer this and more over on the Verge.She also quotes law professor (and long time privacy/internet/email/spam legal expert) Eric Goldman, and it turns out that he published a whole paper on “Emojis and the Law.” I didn’t know this existed yet I am so glad it does. Eric helps us understand the very real concerns about encoding and compatibility, how intellectual property concerns around emoji art can negatively impact

From Bleeping Computer: A woman in Australia was arrested for sending over 32,000 emails to a Federal Member of Parliament, impacting systems enough that people weren’t able to do their normal jobs as a result. She faces charges that could result in a prison term of up to ten years. Read more.Is 32,000 a lot of emails? I guess so, for a regular mailbox. Here I am today, deleting 12,000 messages out of this mailbox, 6,000 out of that mailbox, times about a hundred, for the various deliverability tracking stuff at work, so it doesn’t seem that overwhelming to me. Back at my last job, I had Gmail test mailboxes that would occasionally fill up and I’d be deleting upwards of 150,000 messages at a time. But still, I probably wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that have to work around it to get to the emails