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So, I was the Sr. Internet Mail Administrator at the beginning of what I think most consider to be the real breakout of the Internet — 1995. I’m also co-author
by bradknowles 5y ago
So, I was the Sr. Internet Mail Administrator at the beginning of what I think most consider to be the real breakout of the Internet — 1995. I’m also co-author of the SAGE Booklet “Internet Postmaster: Duties and Responsibilities”. And I’ve been in the anti-spam community for a very long time.
One thing I’ve learned is that you simply cannot validate an e-mail address using the methods you’ve described. Far too many e-mail addresses are not actually deliverable, even if you get a “220 OK” response at that stage. Too much processing is done on the message after the envelope has been transmitted.
For a period of time, people thought that they could automate e-mail address validation (as you have described) as part of of the process of receiving an e-mail message. That is, when your server receives the envelope information, before you allow that sender to proceed any further, you call out to validate the e-mail address that they just gave you.
But there’s no actual authentication there, so you look like a spammer.
Moreover, your e-mail address validation process can be abused to do a denial-of-service attack on anyone they don’t like — just set up a bunch of spambots that all claim to be sending e-mail from victim@example.org, and then watch all those servers doing e-mail address validation just completely nuke the mail servers for example.org. That’s also called a reflection attack.
To put it simply, don’t do e-mail address validation. At least, don’t use the early part of the SMTP protocol to do it.
Instead, send them a real message. Tell them why you’re sending it. Ask for them to reply. If they don’t reply, then the e-mail address might or might not be valid, or they might just be ignoring you. Or they might have complained about your message to their mail server operators, who have then added you to a blacklist.
You won’t know for sure in those cases, but the more information you give them explaining why you’re trying to send them e-mail, the more likely you are to get a positive response. And hopefully, the less likely you are to get blacklisted.
- bradknowles 5y agoOh, and if you are actually a bad actor who is asking for advice on how to get around the blacklists who should be legitimately stopping your traffic, note that I haven’t really given away much information here. EAV stopped being a legitimate tactic in the late 90s. So, In the case that you (or a future reader) is actually a spammer, we will still get you. And it won’t take us that much longer.
- lechuhuuha 5y agoNo im not a spammer or whatever bad actor you can identify. But everyone can say it right :P. Anyway im very thankfull for your helping. If you dont mind can you share some infomation about what is considered a good message? Message base on campaign ? Or message not contain spam keyword ?. I just want to try to increase the rate of open email for our email marketing application. Thanks in advanced!
- erik_seaberg 5y agoYou should know what each recipient asked you to send to them. If not, you’re going to have valid spam complaints.
- bradknowles 5y agoSend them an honest letter written by a real human being, introduce yourself and your company to them, and explain why you're sending a message to them. People tend to really appreciate honesty and authenticity. That said, you should have a legitimate reason why you're sending them an e-mail message, like they signed up for your mailing list, or they bought something from you and you want to keep in touch with your customers, etc..... Make sure you don't send them an e-mail message if they didn't explicitly opt-in to receive e-mail messages from you. Otherwise, you are actually a spammer.
- lechuhuuha 5y agoHi bradknowles. Thanks for your suggestions for what is a good mail massage body. Last thing i want to ask if i want to send these message in bulk do i need to do ip warm-up, smtp server config like dkim,spf and testing on some spam check software like spamassassin. Or something that i missing mind u can correctly ? Thanks in advanced!
- bradknowles 5y agoIf you're sending in bulk, then you're much more likely to be a spammer. If you've got a legitimate business reason to be contacting these people, like they've bought products or services from you in the past, then you most likely do not need to be sending messages in bulk. If you're the operator of a large scale mailing list (on the order of python.org), then you might be sending messages in bulk, but still not a spammer. In that case, tuning large mailing lists to avoid being classified as a spammer is still a topic of investigation. I know that the folks at python.org have to deal with this problem on a regular basis.
- lechuhuuha 5y agoHi bradknowles. Very appreciate for your reply. I will try send them real message with proper configuration from my server.