Happy New Year from Email Manual
Jan 1st
Happy New year from Email Manual.
Many thanks to all who have visited our site, posed questions and generally used the resources available on EM.
2009 was our first year of existance and we hope that 2010 will be an even better year with more followers, more subscribers and we hope to post even more useful posts throughout the year.
We look forward to guiding you through the changes and challenges that 2010 will undoubtedly bring the Email deliverability community.
Yahoo.co.uk mail servers offline.
Dec 21st
Yahoo’s mail servers which handle email for yahoo.co.uk (and possibly other EU domain suffixes) appear to have gone offline a couple of hours ago.
There is no word from yahoo! on the cause or whether the outage is planned or not but ESP’s and bulk mailers should be aware that you will likely build up large queues on your MTA’s and these should be monitored. This is not an issue with your deliverability but instead an outage.
The following servers are affected:
yahoo.co.uk. 449 IN MX 10 mx2.mail.eu.yahoo.com. – 77.238.177.142
yahoo.co.uk. 449 IN MX 10 mx1.mail.eu.yahoo.com. – 217.12.11.35
We will update this post again when the servers return.
Email Manual has a new look
Dec 11th
Email Manual has had a holiday season makeover. If you haven’t been to the site in a little while come and check it out.
The new look site has better integration with our twitter feed, the ability to increase and decrease the size of the text within posts and an improved share to social networks function.
We hope you enjoy the new look and appreciate any feedback.
AOL’s new IP based reputation monitor
Dec 10th
AOL has today launched a new postmaster site. The new site along with its design revamp contains information on best practice guidelines, its whitelisting policy including the three different types of whitelist available, one of which allows guaranteed delivery (goodmail certified mail) and how to join their feedback loop.
For more information on why you should join their feedback loop click here for our previous article on the subject.
In addition to the normal postmaster information listed above AOL has created an IP reputation check tool.
The tool allows anyone to check on their IP reputation as it is measured by AOL. This is a great feature for bulk mailers.
This reputation check allows mailers to see if their RDNS (reverse DNS) has propagated to the AOL servers, one of the basic requirements to send mail to AOL is to have a valid and resolvable rDNS entry, and a 3 color traffic light indicating the status of the IP:
- Green is good
- Yellow is neutral
- Red is poor
- Grey is unknown (AOL have no data)
AOL say that “Mailers should take time to familiarize themselves with this new site, the valuable information contained therein and update their existing bounce codes/classifications with the published ones. AOL’s quote on their new website.” Sound advice.
You can familarize yourself with the new AOL postermaster site here.
Industry Alert: Cox.net launches new postmaster page.
Nov 11th
COX.net have launched a new postmaster site.
Lots of ISPs have postmaster pages, but we particually like this one. It’s comprehensive and one of the few that is actually useful to system administrators trouble shooting blocked messages without looking dated on the day it launches like some other major ISP’s postmaster sites.
The Cox postmaster pages provide error code definitions, preferred connection configurations, instructions on how to sign up for Cox’s feedback loop which operates like many others through returnpath. The pages probably won’t give enough information to solve all delivery issues, but they are helpful in getting started and troubleshooting the issues yourself.
Remember, always use the ISP’s postmaster site before sending an email to the ISP’s abuse team, your likely to get a lot better response if you have checked the FAQ’s yourself.
Let us know what you think, post a comment below.
New feedback loop (FBL) from Tucows by returnpath.
Sep 10th
Today return path and tucows wholesale division OpenSRS have announced a new feedback loop.
For more information on feedback loops see ‘What are feedback loops (fbl’s) and how can they help my deliverability?‘
Tucows is the third-largest wholesale domain registrar, providing Internet services, through its wholesale division known as OpenSRS, for more than 8 million domains. Tucows hosts millions of email inboxes on its OpenSRS Email Service. This feedback loop will cover all of those inboxes.
For a while now OpenSRS and Returnpath have been offering the feedback loop to limited returnpath customers as a private beta process. Now that the kinks and issues have been ironed out this has been made publically available free of charge to parties sending large amounts of mail to OpenSRS members. The feedback loop (FBL) will forward any mail reported as spam originating from the associated IP addresses back to the listed email address given within the application.
The new feedback loop application is available on the following website. http://fbl.hostedemail.com/
Important information for users of spamassassin.
Aug 25th
Recently it has been widely published that bl.open-whois.org, a blocklist which was included within the default install of spamassassin has been taken offline and is no more.
Users of the open source spamassassin application started to report that emails were being marked as spam wrongly. Upon investigation it appears that the domain open-whois.org had fallen into the hands of cyber squatters, presumably because the previous owner of the domain did not reregister the domain.
Although the cyber squatter probably didn’t take on the domain for any malicious reason, it does mean that they have the ability to control the DNS servers for the domain and return results which could cause spamassassin to block and/or bounce inbound emails scanned by spamassassin at worse case, or the best case is that spamassassin will have to do unnecessary lookups to a non-existent blocklist which will cause up to 60 second delays for each inbound email.
As I write this the domain is completely unresponsive to DNS requests and is not returning false positives but Email Manual advice to users of spamassassin would be to reconfigure spamassassin to not check the bl.open-whois.org blocklist to prevent this issue from impacting your inbound email.
This can be done by either upgrading spamassassin to 3.2.x version of spamassassin or by removing any rules which mention bl.open-whois.org from the rules/72_active.cf file within your spamassassin installation folder.
spamassassin 3.2.x is available for download here.
No more report cards/reputation alerts from AOL.
Aug 24th
AOL have today announced that they will no longer be sending report cards to organisations who have a feedback loop with them and that instead these organisations will have to monitor their own reputation.
The report cards used to report to feedback loop owners when any of their IP addresses have exceeded the AOL threshold for the acceptable level of complaints.
This change is effective immediately and the full announcement can be viewed on the AOL postmaster site here:
http://postmaster-blog.aol.com/2009/08/24/announcement-no-more-report-cards/
Fox News reports Americans receive unsolicited email from the Whitehouse. +1 for double opt-in.
Aug 24th
Last week fox news covered a story regarding Americans receiving emails from David Axelrod, an advisor to the president with regard to health care.
In a press conference featured below Major Garrett (senior White House correspondent for the Fox News Channel) quizzed White House Press Secretary “Robert Gibbs” about the emails received by people who claimed they had not opted to receive emails from the White House and had not engaged in anyway with them. The response from the Robert Gibbs who was clearly uncomfortable with the line of questioning was just that he needed the email addresses of the people concerned to be able to check on the status of their subscription to the White House updates and did not speculate how these email addresses may have been added to the White House email database.
Whilst the emails sent by the White House were CAN-SPAM compliant. It was almost certainly unsolicited, in the US however this does not make the email illegal.
The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 does not require mailers to prove opt-in; instead they must provide the ability to opt-out and political emails are also excempt from the act.
The Answer:
The White House said Sunday night that it will change its e-mail sign-up procedures, making subscription clearer, after some recipients of a health-care e-mail complained that they had not asked to receive updates.
This is all very well and good, and its great to hear that the White House is improving its email practices. However wouldn’t the press conference have gone so much smoother if the White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs was able to say that the White House operated a double opt-in scheme? This would have removed any doubt that they had emailed someone who did not want to receive their emails.
A double opt-in scheme is when an email address is added to a list such as the White House list, the email address concerned receives an email with a link to click to verify that the owner of the email address does want to receive updates from the organisation concerned. Although common practice, many email senders still have not introduced double opt-in, potentially concerned that people won’t verify themselves as subscribers. The counter argument to this however, and one that Email Manual subscribe to, is that if people genuinely want to receive updates from you they will verify themselves when they receive an email from the organisation concerned.
What do you think? We would be interested in seeing your comments.
