SenderID, include:, and Google Apps

We’ve run into an interesting edge case involving SenderID and Google’s SPF record.

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Is Amazon Playing Chicken With Mailbox Providers?

The market for an easy outbound mail API “in the cloud” may well be gigantic; it’s pretty obvious that email is the last thing that the latest social/cloud/whatever startup entrepreneur wants to think about. When the next hot site discovers that deliverability isn’t ever guaranteed, will they blame Amazon, or will they blame the mailbox provider who rejected the message?

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You Can Stop the Backscatter

Backscatter occurs when your mail server unintentionally sends auto-generated replies to recipients who didn’t send the email in the first place. Confused? Wait, there’s more.

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Catch More Spam with Zombies

Zombie email addresses are once-valid addresses which have been literally abandoned by their users, yet remain on marketers’ subscriber lists more or less forever. Spam trap operators we spoke to all agreed that it’s best if the address or domain reject all mail for a period of months or (preferably) years before being recycled as a spam trap.

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What’s an FBL?

In spite of the best efforts of anti-spam staff, end users — the account holders, recipients of email — still receive spam. And users want to complain about it, preferably to someone who’ll do something to make it stop. So, somewhere in the later 1990s, mailbox providers created an easy way to complain directly to them.

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2010 Email Predictions: Good News for the Good Guys and More Mischief from the Bad Guys

As we embark on a new year and a new decade (and Return Path’s second decade in business), I’m back with my annual predictions for the email industry. My 2009 good news-bad news predictions were somewhat prescient but certainly not my best effort. So, after considerable thought and a fair amount of internal debate, here’s what I’ve got:

1) ISPs will focus more of their anti-spam efforts around picking out the good guys rather than blocking the bad guys. Why? There are just so many more bad guys – and we’ve reached a tipping point where it is faster and cheaper to cherry pick the good senders. Along with their internal tools, we’ll see more ISPs rely on 3rd party white lists like Return Path Certification for more accurate filtering.

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Snow-shoeing and how to avoid it

As you may know, just in time for Christmas, The Spamhaus Project recently announced their new anti-snow-shoeing service the CSS component of the SBL: http://www.spamhaus.org/css/index.lasso

Spamhaus also has an http://www.spamhaus.org/news.lasso?article=650>article that offers some good information.

The CSS is the second such list to appear online; Invaluement was the first out of the gate with their ivmSIP/24 zone.

Both the SBL and ivmSIP/24 are part of the batch of checks we run constantly, against Return Path Certified and Safe whitelisted IPs. We also run a number of other tests to flag activity that is frowned upon by the receiving community.

SURBL, the domain blacklist, just announced their new, experimental zone of snowshoe domains, XS.

So, what is snowshoeing and how do you avoid such a pitfall?

Snowshoeing is, in a nutshell, spreading mail over IP ranges, domains or name-servers, in an attempt to lessen the impact of poor reputation upon an individual element.

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Prioritization of Spam at Gmail

UPDATE: The original version of this post had a link to the main Google YouTube channel, which had featured the spam video. After we published this, they swapped in a new video, causing confusion for some readers. We’ve now updated the link to go directly to the video about Gmail spam priorization. Sorry for any confusion we caused.

Google’s Gmail can be somewhat of a mystery. They do things a bit differently than other large ISPs and they do it well. From our perspective in deliverability, Gmail is always a tougher ISP to understand and troubleshoot.

Most of the experts know that Gmail relies heavily on their user feedback and “this is spam” vs. “this is not spam” voting, but many questions remained around how they really prioritize complaints. Recently, they posted a video to YouTube that helps us understand just a little more and pull back a bit more of the mystery.

Google’s Matt Cutts says Google does order complaints, and that typically, they try to think about what the impact is on the user. So, if they get …

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AOL Cancels Report Cards

Yesterday the AOL postmaster site announced that they will no longer be sending report cards to people on the AOL feedback loop when their complaint rate crosses a certain threshold (.30%).

We’ve always recommended our clients keep a close eye on their feedback loop data as one way to maximize their deliverability. When complaint rates spike, it’s time to take a deeper look at your messaging campaign and any recent changes that may have negatively impacted complaint rates — policy and practices changes are ultimately the key to …

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When Botnets Get Stymied, You’re Next

You’ve probably heard about botnets by now — those networks of home computers infected by viruses or other malware, controlled en masse by some shadowy bad guys. Botnets are used to send most of the world’s spam, attack web sites, steal credit card numbers and other personal information, or other nefarious activities — for anyone, for a fee.

Broadband connections are so prevalent these days, all over the world, that botnet operators can pick and choose which infected computers are sufficiently high-bandwidth for their needs. But these broadband connections all flow through one ISP or another, so ISPs are very aware of the problem — and extremely concerned.

Today MAAWG released a paper aimed at helping these ISPs, titled “MAAWG Common Best Practices for Mitigating Large Scale Bot Infections in Residential Networks.” It’s the product of many discussions, including many of the leading experts. “As an industry,” MAAWG Chair Michael O’Reirdan said in the press release, “we are becoming more proactive in alerting customers when bots are detected on their computers and in helping users remove the malware before it can harm them.”

It’ll take some time, and a lot of work, but the effectiveness of botnets will — after a while — be reduced. And then what? Now that they’ve gotten a taste of all the money to be made, the botnet operators won’t go back to flipping perogies. They’ll find another way.

That’d be you. …

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