Spam Resource
It’s Friday! Why don’t we have a little bit of fun today? Here’s the first in a (maybe) regular series of me talking to interesting people about stuff. Fun stuff, boring stuff. Work stuff, silly stuff. Different stuff. Let’s call it: Spam Resource Spotlight. I hope you’ll enjoy it! With ten years experience in the email marketing, deliverability and compliance space, my friend Alison Gootee (who is not a photographer based in Brooklyn and New Orleans) is somebody that you should consider an expert. Currently she’s a ‘spam stopper, best practices advocate, and general know-it-all’ for a large email and marketing automation provider Hey, Alison! Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today! Can you tell me how you came to get started in this wacky world of deliverability? Hey Al! Thank you so much for inviting me! I have been a long-time admirer of yours, and it’s
Here’s a new oops that I’ve observed a few times recently! In case you didn’t know already, you can’t have two DMARC records for your domain name. (I’m not talking about subdomains … I’m talking about specifically having two DMARC DNS records at the same level in DNS.) If you look up your domain’s DMARC record, using dmarcian’s DMARC Inspector, or the Wombatmail tool, or any of the many fine tools out there, and you look up your domain name, and you see that domain has two DMARC records in DNS, that’s a fail. Not a good thing. You don’t want that. You can have only one. Here’s an example of a domain with a busted double DMARC record. I didn’t even create that one special for you — that was my own oops. So I’m going to leave it in place, to share with you all. See, it happens
Hopefully you were able to attend the webinar yesterday with myself and LB Blair talking about DMARC and what senders need to know to be in compliance with the new DMARC requirements levied by Yahoo and Google this year (2024). We kept a lot of it high level — the point wasn’t to spend six hours training you through every bit of the protocol spec. But if you DID want to learn more, M3AAWG, the Messaging, Mobile, and Malware Anti-Abuse Working Group, has the good stuff. They’ve got a whole multi-part series on DMARC where they cover the fundamentals of authentication, alignment, policy, reporting, domain owner and mailbox provider best practices and more. If you just want to implement DMARC for your marketing domain and be done with it, you don’t need this. But if you do want to become a DMARC expert, this is the logical next step in
It’s time for some more fun with data! How broadly has DMARC been adopted? It’s a complex question and the answer is “it depends.” Many good senders have already implemented it — but based on Yahoo and Google pushing for it this year, it has clearly not been adopted widely enough for it to be considered a “must have” for every domain that sends mail. (And let’s not forget about domains that don’t send mail.) Every month, I take a peek at the top 10 million domains, logging various bits of DNS so that I can do later analysis. One of those data bits is: Does this domain have a DMARC record? Surprisingly, you can’t assume that the answer is yes. Though you can see that DMARC adoption is slowly nudging upward, only around 1.23 million domains (out of the top ten million) have a DMARC record in play. Now…this
Do you know about Swaks? Maybe not! It is perhaps not very widely known, but it is an amazingly useful tool. Swaks, created and maintained by John Jetmore, is billed as a “Swiss Army Knife for SMTP” and that’s an apt description. What is it? It’s an SMTP testing utility. It lets you watch as it connects to a remote mail server and attempts to send an email message using the values you specify. You can specify the sender, recipient, and which server to connect to. You can also specify body content, if you want, though it has a good default “this is a test” setting. And it has been updated, with version 20240103.0 newly released in January 2024. New features include BCC and CC support, TLS debugging and improvements, improved documentation and other enhancements. Swaks is a technical email nerd’s best friend. I use it to test things like:
Hey there! In my new role as Director of Deliverability for AWeber, I’m going to dive right in! I’m putting together a new webinar AS WE SPEAK, that covers everybody’s favorite topic — DKIM, DMARC, YAHOO, GMAIL & YOU! Also known as: what you need to do to comply with Yahoo and Google’s new sender requirements. Because this is focused on AWeber customers, I’ll cover everything from where and how to buy a domain name for your email messages (and why you have to), how to link that up to your AWeber account to correctly authenticate your email sends, how to configure and implement a DMARC record, and more! And I’ll take your questions, too! I hope you’ll join me alongside Jesse Kennedy to learn more about these very important bits for email sending success! The fun happens Wednesday, January 17th at 12:00 eastern. Click here to register.
Email and marketing automation platform Klaviyo is hiring! They’re looking to fill the role of “Manager, Global Email Deliverability,” in a hybrid (partly in-office) capacity, attached to their Boston office. In that role, you would: Support the implementation of the strategic vision for global email deliverability that is aligned with the company’s focus on growth. Lead and develop a team of Deliverability Consultants and Analysts to provide the ultimate experience for Klaviyo customers. Track the overall health of the email deliverability business at Klaviyo, taking action as needed to ensure our customers can rely on Klaviyo as their sending platform. Lead your team to maintain working relationships with all major mailbox providers, blocklisting agencies, and other key stakeholders in the messaging ecosystem. Educate Klaviyo employees and customers on messaging practices that will help to drive good deliverability and, in collaboration with the Enablement and Customer education teams, create user guides
As you well know, Gmail and Yahoo Mail are now requiring that all senders start to publish a DMARC record, if they weren’t publishing one already. Hopefully you watched the webinar with LB Blair and myself (I’ll link to the recording here as soon as it is available) where we talk at length about DMARC and what you need to know to start to be able to “speak DMARC” as needed. But if you didn’t watch that? And don’t have the time to dive into making yourself a DMARC export? What’s the five minute version of all of this, how do you get up and running quickly without having to stop and worry about RFCs and options. “Just tell me what I need to know to get it done.” Okay, I got you. Here we go. Before you proceed with this, you need to ensure that you’ve implemented DKIM authentication for
Cox Communications is a US-based cable internet provider, providing telecommunications services to twenty states and the District of Columbia. But don’t call them a mailbox provider — at least not any more. They’re handing off cox.net mailboxes to be managed as a part of Yahoo Mail. Cox.net mail users won’t lose their email access — they’ll just get at that email via Yahoo Mail, post transition. As a consumer mailbox provider — Cox was never that big. (And wasn’t growing — AZFamily.com reports that Cox stopped offering new webmail accounts back in 2019.) Based on 2021 data, I think they were perhaps number nine or ten down the list when counted by number of active subscribers on typical B2C marketing lists. Yahoo will continue to be number two (behind Gmail) both before and after this transition of Cox user mailboxes, though it’s nice to see this growth in the Yahoo
Coming up on Wednesday, LB Blair and I will be talking DMARC in detail, preparing you for the upcoming DMARCpocalypse brought upon us thanks to the new sender rules from Google and Yahoo. Join us and learn lots about DMARC and what you need to know to comply with the new DMARC sender requirements. Spam Resource and Email Industries are partnering to present DMARC-Pocalypse Now: What you need to know about DMARC and new Yahoo/Gmail requirements , a live free webinar! The fun begins Wednesday January 10, 2024 at 11:00 US central time, and you can register for the webinar right here. We’ll start with email authentication basics (DKM, SPF, and DMARC), explain exactly what a DMARC record is and why you should care. We’ll cover DMARC reports, why you might want a tool or service to process reports and build reports (dashboards) for you, explain the risks around DMARC policy and implementation, other gotchas