Reputation

The other day, I talked about the spam seemingly sent by a local aldermanic campaign here in Chicago. When I talked about this spam on Facebook, one of the folks pushing back attempted to lead me down an existential rabbit hole based on the theory that we just can’t know whether or not a given email message is spam. That it is literally impossible to know with absolute certainty whether or not a single email message is unsolicited. Which is yet another one of those (possibly) correct but (definitely) not very useful kind of responses. Let’s break it down.First, let’s get this out of the way. Yes, it’s absolutely true that there is no “this message is unsolicited” flag or email header in an email message, allowing anyone, at a glance, to immediately know, whether or not a given email message is spam or not.The recipient has a pretty good

SocketLabs’ Brian Godiksen and Campaign Monitor’s Travis Hazlewood joined forces in this excellent blog post to explain what can go wrong when you use a subdomain (under a domain you don’t own) to send mail. Example? Some registrars offer up this goofy thing where you can buy a “domain” “under” uk.com, like spamresource.uk.com. Neat idea, except it’s really just a subdomain. And the domain uk.com has a poor reputation at Gmail, making it kind of hard to get email delivered to the inbox reliably, if I use a uk.com subdomain as my sending domain.So as to not totally steal their thunder, I’ll make you click on through to get their thoughts on what to do instead, and how to measure risk with regard to your choice of TLD (top level domain). This is one you need to read before you buy a new domain name to use for email!

At tomorrow’s #ltdelivery session we’ll continue talking about session: Maintaining and warming up reputations. Invitations are going out end of the day (Dublin) today. Want to join dozens of your colleagues talking about Reputation? Sign up on our #ltdelivery page.

Presentation about DMARC Terry Zink did at 2014 Virus Bulletin conference in Seattle.