Email Beyond English

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

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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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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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SenderID, include:, and Google Apps

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

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AOL’s MX Record Disappeared Temporarily Overnight

AOL’s MX record vanished for three hours this morning. What does that mean? What happens when the MX record disappears?

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What Does It Mean to “Certify” Email?

In the certified email concept, what’s certified is that the sender of the message is following a set of standards or practices, and thus should be allowed to send the message. In the certified postal mail concept, what’s certified is that the message was successfully sent and/or delivered and/or received, depending on the level of service. The same word, applied to different aspects of the transaction, results in very different products.

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Validating Addresses in an Unbounded Namespace

Though they don’t always realize it, accuracy in domain names is important to end users when it comes to their email addresses — and it’s equally important to anyone who collects email addresses, for any purpose. Mistyped email addresses can have far-reaching consequences.

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MAAWG Announces Best Practices for Feedback Loops

This week the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) released their newest Best Common Practices (BCP) document, focused on complaint feedback loops. Complaint Feedback Loops provide a mechanism for ISPs and other mailbox providers to funnel spam complaints from their customers back to the sender of the message. While they were originally conceived as tools just for ISPs to use to identify abuse coming from their servers and networks, most ISPs that offer them today allow email marketers, publishers, and other senders to enroll, and those traditional bulk senders have made it standard practice to do so.

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Debating Standards While the Sun Shines

The IETF — the Internet Engineering Task Force — is, simply put, the standards body for the internet. As a body, they’ve been responsible for nearly every technical protocol that makes the internet work, from TCP/IP and SMTP to more recent developments like IPv6 and OAuth.

It was a beautiful week to be in Anaheim, even in the ring of hotels surrounding Disneyland — temperatures above 70 degrees F., clear blue Southern California skies, while more than a foot of snow landed on Denver. But the 1,200 attendees of the IETF’s 77th meeting spent most of their time inside fluorescent-lit meeting rooms, engaged in deep engineering debates.

IETF is kind of the opposite of TED, that famous gathering of fast-talking deep thinkers. It still involves some of the smartest people in the world, but …

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The Root of All Email

This week, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published a number of what they call “RFCs,” which originally meant “Requests for Comment” — the standards documents which specify the technical underpinnings of the internet. Two of these, numbered 5321 and 5322, replace earlier documents defining the very core of internet email. On the surface, each of these seem surprisingly simple; one aims “…to transfer mail reliably and efficiently,” while the other defines itself as “…a definition of what message content format is to be passed between systems.” Yet without general industry-wide acceptance of (and compliance with) these standards, internet email simply would not exist.

This week also marks ten years since the death of Jon Postel, who arguably had more influence over the creation of the internet than any other single person. One of Jon’s most enduring recommendations is …

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