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If you have any interest in the latest news around email, email security, or phishing you’ve probably heard the buzz following up last week’s announcement of a new technology to help fight phishing and spoofing emails called DMARC (which stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance). Along with all of the interest that we have seen both from the media and from the industry-at-large, I’ve still seen a fair amount of confusion around what DMARC currently is and is not. I wanted to take a couple of moments to help provide a bit more clarity on the topic as well as discuss some of the upcoming ways in which Return Path is helping to continually educate the email and security world on DMARC.

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Remembering J.D.

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write in 12 years as Return Path’s CEO. I hope it never has an equal.

One of our long-time employees, J.D. Falk, passed away today after a year-long struggle with cancer. J.D., which most people don’t know was short for Jesse David, was only 37 years old. Although I cannot claim to be a close friend of J.D.’s, I have known him fairly well in the industry going back about eight years, and he has been a trusted member of our team here for the last four+ years.

J.D. did great work for us at Return Path, but my admiration for him goes beyond that.

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Email Beyond English

Expanding beyond the initial English alphabet and characters was, and remains, a challenge for email systems.

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We’ve Changed the FBL Enrollment Process — Here’s Why

If you or your organization has recently applied for enrollment in IP-based feedback loops that we host (e.g., Comcast, Road Runner, etc.) you may have noticed that the confirmation email part of the enrollment process has changed. In this article …

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Filtering Mail the Old-Fashioned Way

Before graphical email programs were common — before web browsers were common, if you can imagine that — the average internet user actually had more control over their email environment than most do now. That level of control is only now beginning to reappear, with smart automated filters and so forth — but we would do well to learn from history.

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Reporting Spam on Mobile Devices

Return Path’s new study reveals that the massive increase in email readership on mobile devices corresponds with a decrease in use of webmail, particularly on weekends. If your focus is either spam detection or list management, that’s bad news.

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What Ever Happened to ADSP?

Many mailbox providers are concerned about liability and expectations: they know they’ll be blamed by their users and even by senders when a senders’ ADSP policy leads to a legitimate (but unsigned) message being discarded. They’re also concerned that they’ll be expected to provide technical support for every mail operator who wants to use ADSP. Similarly, those same mail operators — whether senders of bulk marketing email, enterprise Exchange administrators, or mailbox providers themselves — are worried that there may be mail streams that aren’t applying DKIM correctly, or aren’t authenticating at all.

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Major Telecommunications Providers Cooperate to Stop Spam in Europe

Using the Abuse Reporting Format (ARF) and Return Path’s feedback report processing technology, ETIS members help each other find the spammers lurking within each others’ networks — and their customers’ networks, and their customers’ networks.

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Microsoft tests DKIM and ADSP

An engineer from Microsoft recently shared some of the thinking behind Hotmail’s adoption of DKIM and ADSP.

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Understanding the “Precedence:” Header

Though never formally standardized, the Precedence: header has been around since the earliest days of internet email. Google’s use of the Precedence: header for labeling is a new idea, and (probably) unique.

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