Steve Atkins
A lot of beginner questions about email delivery aren’t about broad strategies for success, or technical details about authentication, or concerns about address acquisition. They’re something like: My mail to $ISP is being blocked. How do I contact someone there? Asking a question to your peers about how to deal with a concrete problem you’re having is a great thing to do – you might get immediate help, and hopefully you’ll pick up some technical or industry information and level up some skills along the way. But there are good questions and good ways to ask them, and bad questions and bad ways to ask them. You really want to get the most value out of the answers you get, and you don’t want to waste your peers valuable time. Lets talk about the “My mail is blocked, who do I ask to fix it?” sort of question on an
Google are circulating a new set of requirements for bulk senders on their blog. So are Yahoo. It’s almost like postmasters talk to each other or something. If you dig through the links in the Gmail blog post you can find this summary of what they’ll be requiring from bulk senders by February: Set up SPF or DKIM email authentication for your domain. Ensure that sending domains or IPs have valid forward and reverse DNS records, also referred to as PTR records. Learn more Keep spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. Learn more Format messages according to the Internet Message Format standard (RFC 5322). Don’t impersonate Gmail From: headers. Gmail will begin using a DMARC quarantine enforcement policy, and impersonating Gmail From: headers might impact your email delivery. If you regularly forward email, including using mailing lists or inbound gateways, add ARC headers to outgoing email. ARC headers indicate the message was forwarded and identify
History Return Path was a major driver for the establishment of Feedback Loops (FBLs) back in the mid to late 2000s. They worked with a number of ISPs to help them set up FBLs and managed the signup and validation step for them. In return for providing this service to senders and receivers, they used this data as part of their certification process and their deliverability consulting. Return Path had a strong corporate ethos of improving the overall email ecosystem that originated from the CEO and permeated through the whole organization. In 2019 Validity acquired Return Path and within two months closed two offices and laid off more than 170 employees, many who are industry leaders and long time colleagues. In 2020 Validity acquired 250OK, one of their major competitors. Over the next year they then ended long term agreements with ESP partners, sued competitors and significantly raised prices for
When you query DNS for something you ask your local DNS recursive resolver for all answers it has about a hostname of a certain type. If you’re going to a website your browser asks your resolver for all records for “google.com” of type “A”1 and it will either return all the A records for google.com it has cached, or it will do the complex process of looking up the results from the authoritative servers, cache them for as long as the TTL field for the reply says it should, then return them to you. There are dozens of different types of records, AAAA for IPv6 IP addresses, MX for mailservers, TXT for arbitrary text, mostly used for various sorts of authentication (including SPF, DKIM and DMARC). And then there’s CNAME. CNAME stands for “Canonical Name” and means “Go and ask this different question instead”. If you have a DNS record
When someone sends a complaint to your compliance desk there are a range of things you want to do, but one thing you always want to do is ensure that the recipient doesn’t receive any more unwanted email from your customer. Or, at least, not from your network. There are usually several different ways you can make sure that happens. There are big hammers a compliance desk can use in egregious cases – if the customer is immediately terminated, or has their ability to send mail suspended then there won’t be any more unwanted email to anyone, including the person who has reported unwanted mail. More normally, though, you’ll want to stop all mail from your customer to just the person reporting them immediately, at least while you look at the customers statistics and investigate further. If the report includes a copy of the offending email then there’ll be an
Eventually our subscribers won’t want our email in their inbox any more. They can stop the mail either by unsubscribing from it, or by marking it as spam. We’d far rather they do the first so we should make it as easy as possible for them to unsubscribe. Also in most jurisdictions you’re legally required to offer a functional, easy to use unsubscription channel. So, how to do that? There are a few different ways to accept unsubscription requests, and most legitimate bulk mail should offer several of them. Reply to unsubscribe The recipient replies to the email, the person handling replies removes them from the list. This is a problematic way of handling unsubscription requests. On the one hand, sending mail that recipients can’t reply to, or where replies are bounced, responded to automatically or silently discarded is fairly recipient-hostile. It’s better if those replies go to a customer
I stumbled across this story again this morning, and it’s such a lovely delivery yarn I thought I’d share it. It’s from Trey Harris, and it’s set in the mid 90s. Here’s a problem that *sounded* impossible… I almost regret posting the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a conference. 🙂 The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining. I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department. “We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.” “What’s the problem?” I asked. “We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained. I choked on my latte. “Come again?” “We can’t send mail farther than 500
Here, find quick links to everything I can find relating to the upcoming Apple privacy changes. Remember what we learned from MPP — meaning that exactly when and how the functionality launches is still TBD, exactly what this impacts could change over time, and that this will not be the end of the world. Stay tuned as I’m sure there will be more to write and to learn about this functionality as we move forward torward final public release (and then after).iOS17 filtering click tracking links (Steve Atkins, Word to the Wise)Link Tracking Protection in iOS 17 & macOS Sonoma: Important changes for marketers (Nicole Merlin, Knak)Marketers, what you need to know about iOS 17, LTP, and privacy trends (Peter Jakus, Bloomreach Engagement)The Scoop on iOS 17 and Link Tracking (Scott Desgrosseilliers, Wicked Reports)Bonus: Are you wondering this functionality would be enabled or disabled by users? See “How to automatically
When I recently mentioned that new Apple privacy changes were coming in iOS17, it was nigh impossible to share exactly what was coming, as I did not have the opportunity to test it myself — and even if any of us tests it, it could end up working differently when the final version of Apple’s latest mobile operating system is finally released, later this year. So, I didn’t have much to share. Thankfully, somebody has to come to the rescue.Steve Atkins of Word to the Wise has done a most excellent job of exploring exactly how automatic removal of click-tracking parameters works in the current iOS17 beta. It is most definitely worth a read, to better understand how things are probably going to work in iOS17. Do keep in mind, functionality could still be subject to change. Even with that limitation, this is still great research and kudos to Steve
I’ve heard quite a bit of concern about what iOS 17’s automatic removal of click-tracking parameters means, but less discussion of what it actually does. Broadly it’s Apple trying to improve user-privacy by making it harder to do cross-site tracking at scale. Cross-site tracking is the basis of a lot of privacy-violating tracking technologies, and tracking parameters added to links evade Safari’s technologies that mitigate tracking via cross-site cookies or other forms of session storage. (As partial compensation, Apple is supporting Private Click Measurement. That’ll allow ad click measurements without sending PII to the advertisers.) But, what does it actually mean? I’ve not seen much in the way of documentation, so I built a test harness, installed an iOS 17 developer beta on a spare iPad and looked at what it does. The test setup is very, very simple. I have a custom webserver that accepts clicks and logs the