Spam Resource
What do you do for DMARC monitoring reporting? I’ve used OnDMARC by Redsift, dmarcian and EasyDMARC and I like different things about all three of them. I’d say they’re all worth looking at, but I don’t want to dive too deeply down the hole of which one is best for SMB, enterprise, etc. I could spend many hours investigating (and I’ve already spent a few) and who knows if I would come up with the best answer. (I’ve also looked at the Postmark free tier and it seems like it might be “good enough” for really small senders with light needs.) But together, that’s only four out of the universe of DMARC solution vendors out there. Is there a master list somewhere, with every possible one on it? It turns out that there is! DMARCVendors.com tries to be just that. I’m not sure who is behind this site, but I’ve
Steve Atkins from Word to the Wise just released a very cool new tool called Aboutmy.Email. Bookmark it now! What do you do with it? Go to the Aboutmy.Email website, copy the unique email address it hands you, and launch your newsletter or campaign to that address. What happens next? Aboutmy.Email gives you a detailed report, checking your domains, headers, content and more to look for problems. It even has a “Good Practice” review section, which is code for “Does your email seem to comply with the new Yahoo and Gmail sender requirements?” Want to see an example report? Here’s one for a Spam Resource newsletter. What are all the checks it does? Steve says that it reviews: SPF, DKIM, DMARC BIMI, including details about the certificate and image What IP address it was sent from, and whether it has valid DNS The size of the mail as sent (no
Twilio Sendgrid (just?) released their ” 2023 Email Marketing Benchmark Report ” and it’s chock-full of baseline and quartile metrics for you to refer to when ranking your own marketing efforts. Here and there a stat might seem a bit weak (5% open rate at best?) but when you take every industry and vertical together and mix it all in a blender, you’re probably going to blend away some of those edge cases. The data is actually from 2022 — not sure why it’s effectively a year delayed or if I missed it before (?) but it’s a fun read, nonetheless. Thank you, Twilio Sendgrid, for sharing this! You know how much I love to stack rank mailbox providers to help define the size of the mailbox universe — I’ve done it with my own small data, and I’ve linked to others summing up their own data, but it’s nice
It’s that time again! Let’s roll through the blog stats and look for what was most popular, most read during 2023 here on the Spam Resource blog. Number five: Gmail now rejecting unauthenticated mail The fifth most popular blog post on Spam Resource in 2023 warned folks that Gmail was now taking a harder stance against unauthenticated mail. They didn’t immediately start fully blocking all unauthenticated mail, but they are now quick to block mail from domains, if they had ever previously seen authentication, but now current mail is not authenticated. A complex message, but still, a significant change, and a harbinger of things to come at Gmail. Number four: Comcast email addresses: .com or .net? I was right to think that this is confusing enough that it’s something people search for on Google quite regularly. Thanks, organic SEO! Number three: ISP Deliverability Guide: Yahoo/AOL (Updated for 2022) Gmail isn’t
Today, I’m proud to announce the re-launch of Wombatmail! Here I’ve consolidated all of my different tools together (and create some new ones), and do some other fun new stuff, and that will all be centralized under Wombatmail. Over at www.wombatmail.com you will find: Wombatmail Tools: I’ve moved over most of my DNS tools from XNND, and they’ll now live here on Wombatmail. It’s a great place to quickly look up a domain’s MX record, DMARC record, BIMI record, and more. If you poke around, you might find a funky or unique tool here in there, like the DKIM selectors/key search or multi-public DNS server checks to monitor a delegation/caching issue. Nothing too fancy, just simple tools to help you do simple checks when needed, all me and all free. I’ll link you to useful tools from other, too, as needed. Wombatmail Data: One of my “fun with data” projects where I’ve taken the top 10 million domains, appended MX records
Yeah, I guess that’s about right. Source: Twitter/X/Whatever it’s called today.
On April 4, 2022, the Certified Senders Alliance invited Yahoo’s Marcel Becker and yours truly (Al Iverson) of Spam Resource to “embark upon a discussion of domain reputation” where we also talk in length about open tracking, how it wasn’t that accurate to begin with (bots mostly talking to bots) but now, with Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), it’s even less accurate than before. That doesn’t mean you should never rely on open data to make an informed decision about an audience segment — but it does mean that you should never trust an “open” even tracked at the subscriber level, when making any sort of decision on what to do with an individual subscriber. Meaning, don’t use opens as part of your drip campaign logic to decide who gets what email — it won’t be accurate. But, for myself, I’ll continue to say that there’s a place for open
Andrew Kordek and I go way back — he, at Groupon, and me, at ExactTarget, working together (indeed sometimes out of that same Groupon office in Chicago) to help manage, monitor and mitigate deliverability issues for the world’s number one daily deal site. Scale was not the only challenge, but it was a big one! Fast forward to today — actually, fast forward to about a year ago, given that I just realized that I had never shared this here before. Here I am chatting with Andrew Kordek, now of iPost, about list hygiene and keeping clean data. When list hygiene is most important — when up front verification matters, where it doesn’t quite matter so much, and when and how to define the perfect purge (sunset) strategy. It’s short (under 12 minutes) and fun, and I wanted to put it on here for posterity’s sake. Thanks, Andrew, for the
I’ve got some important info for you today (and a reminder of two free webinars; one recorded, one upcoming and live) related to all of this. First, Yahoo and Google are both indicating that the compliance deadlines for their upcoming new sender requirements are changing. Yahoo is indicating that authentication requirements and low complaint rates must be met by February 2024, but that one-click unsub now has an implementation deadline of June, 2024. Publishing a DMARC policy and authenticating with both DKIM and SPF seems to be required as of February 2024. (More info here.) Google is indicating that “enforcement for bulk senders that don’t meet our email sender guidelines will be gradual and progressive. Starting in February 2024, senders out of compliance are likely to see light and intermittent temporary deferrals. Starting in April, that’ll change to rejections instead of deferrals, and they’ll increase the percentage of non-compliant mail
Roger Ebert, in addition to having been one of the best movie reviewers out there, is known to me, and to many other spam fighters out there, for having coined “The Boulder Pledge” way back in 1996. The Boulder Pledge is as follows: “Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.” In other words, if you don’t like spam, make sure you don’t buy things from spam, to help minimize the chances of a spammer’s success. Bill Weinman explains more context around the Boulder Pledge here, and shares Roger’s original column promoting the pledge, from way back in the day. Enjoy.