Since we all take a lot of time preparing and sending our email marketing campaigns, lI've asked our Email Delivery team to update us on what's going on in the world of deliverability. Here's the lowdown...
Rate Limiting with Most Major ISPs
Just about every Internet Service Provider (AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.) is now rate limiting the amount of email that can come into their system from a given IP address. This started with Yahoo! and Bell South, and has now many ISPS are doing it. Established IP addresses with good reputations (this describes our IPs we send email from) naturally have the highest limits of email that can go through in a given time and IPs with no reputations (or bad reputations) have the lowest limits.
Even though our reputation is great, our email may still be rate limited from time to time. This means that, sometimes, your email to a certain domain may arrive an hour or so later than you send it out. This shouldn't be too common, but it is an industry wide issue. So if you see a problem with your email being delayed to Yahoo or somewhere else, then it could be just a rate limiting issue.
Call with Microsoft - Phishing Schemes are Plentiful
Our Email Delivery King George was on a call with Microsoft and the word of the day was "phishing". What is phishing? It is when someone tries to get sensitive and confidential information by posing as a legitimate business. Banks are often the target of a phishing scheme were the phisher would pretend to be a popular bank, using email or IM link you to a page that looks like the bank's site where they ask you to input your user information.
Three things came out of the call:
- Phishing has had a "6 fold" increase in just the last 2 years. Yahoo.com & bankofamerica.com are the number 1 spoofed domains used by Phishers.
- Phishers are very smarter marketers. They know their targets extremely well and their emails are usually sent out at just the right time to be the most effective.
- All major browsers will be putting into place a phishing filter for web pages that have been confirmed as phishing sites, and will warn the user of this.
Microsoft also mentioned that they have a new optional add-on for Internet Explorer users that warns them of potential phishing sites. When an IE user clicks on a link and is taken to a site that has been confirmed by Microsoft's security staff as a phishing site, the actual address bar of the browser will display red, the site will be blocked from the user and a warning from Microsoft will be displayed.
If an IE user goes to a site that is suspicious, their address bar will be yellow and they will be warned that this is a suspicious website by Microsoft.
With this new phishing filter, users can report a site they believe to be a phishing site. Once they do this, Microsoft's security team will then investigate the report.
That's all for now. Questions? Send us a comment.
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