Internet and e-mail policy and practice including Notes on Internet E-mail

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Home :: Email 14 Oct 2020 My, that's a lot of mail Email I get a lot of mail from political campaigns. I expect a lot of us do. In my case, each campaign gets a separate e-mail address so I can track how much they pass the addresses around. (Nothing surprising, local passes them to national for the same party, stuff like that.) While I was supposed to be doing something else, I wrote some scripts to track the mail, per campaign. You can see the results, updated daily, at https://www.taugh.com/polispam.php. If it looks like one day the Republican presidential campaign sent me 15 separate messages, yup, they did. It's not entirely clear what their strategy is because they keep telling me that I am one of their TOP 100 SUPPORTERS even though I've never sent them a dime.   posted at: 14:21 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/polispam.html 11 Mar 2020 Political e-mail placement or, you're not special Email A recent piece in The Markup called Swinging the Vote? attempts to figure out how Google decides where to deliver political e-mail. They were startled to discover that only a small fraction of it was delivered into the main inbox, and a fair amount was classed as spam. They shouldn't have been. See more ...   posted at: 11:55 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/notspecial.html 07 Sep 2019 Fewer bad examples for mail Email The DNS has always had a few names for use as examples in documentation, domains example.com, example.net, example.org, and example.edu. In 1999 RFC 2606 formally reserved the first three. There's nothing technically special about these names, which have normal WHOIS and DNS entries, managed by IANA. Until recently, that meant that even though none of them handle any e-mail, mail sent to them by mistake worked badly. See more ...   posted at: 05:56 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/exampnull.html 28 May 2019 What does it mean to Deploy DMARC? Email The IETF's DMARC working group is thinking about a maintenance update to the DMARC spec, fixing bits that are unclear and perhaps changing it where what mail servers do doesn't exactly agree with what it says. Someone noted that a lot of mailers claim to have ``deployed DMARC'', and it's not at at all clear what that really means. See more ...   posted at: 23:32 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/dmarcwhat.html 03 May 2018 Choosing Internationalized E-mail addresses Email Recently I've been working on EAI mail, looking at what software is available (Gmail and Outlook/Hotmail both handle it now) and what work remains to be done. A surprisingly tricky part is assigning EAI addresses to users. In traditional ASCII mail, the local part of the address, what goes before the @ sign, can be any printable ASCII characters. Although an address like %i()/;~f@examp1e.com is valid, and mail systems will handle it, users don't want addresses like that. A good address is one that is easy to remember, easy to tell someone over the phone, and easy to type. Mail systems all give senders some help when interpreting addresses. If an address is Bob@example, they'll accept bob@ or BOB@. If the address is joe.smith@, they'll accept Joe.Smith@ and often variations in punctuation like joesmith@ without the dots. The flip side of this is that you don't assign different addresses that are too similar. While it is techincally possible that BOB@ and bob@ could deliver to different mailboxes, nobody does that. Similarly, nobody makes joesmith@ and joe.smith@ different. (They may not both work, but if they do, they're the same mailbox.) The domain (the part of the address after the @ sign) has to follow the DNS rules, which don't allow any fuzzy matching other than ASCII upper and lower case. How does all this extend into EAI mail? See more ...   posted at: 14:24 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/eaiaddr.html

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