Enlarge / "You'll never be bored again" is one of the more fitting slogans attached to Tumblr. (credit: Getty Images)

It's not quite the end of Tumblr, but when management is supposedly sending memos with the Lord Tennyson quote about having "loved and lost," it doesn't look like there's much of a future.

Internet statesman and Waxy.org proprietor Andy Baio posted what is "apparently an internal Automattic memo making the rounds on Tumblr" to Threads. The memo, written to employees at WordPress.com parent company Automattic, which bought Tumblr from Verizon's media arm in 2019 , is titled or subtitled "You win or you learn." The posted memo states that a majority of the 139 employees working on product and marketing at Tumblr (in a team apparently named "Bumblr" ) will "switch to other divisions." Those working in "Happiness" (Automattic's customer support and service division) and "T&S" (trust and safety) would remain.

"We are at the point where after 600+ person-years of effort put into Tumblr since the acquisition in 2019, we have not gotten the expected results from our effort, which was to have revenue and usage above its previous peaks," the posted memo reads. After quotes and anecdotes about love, loss, mountain climbing, and learning on the journey, the memo notes that nobody will be let go and that team members can make a ranked list of their top three preferred assignments elsewhere inside Automattic .

Enlarge / Mitchell Baker, Mozilla CEO, at a conference in 2019. (credit: Horacio Villalobos / Contributor | Corbis News )

This week, Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker rose as a key figure in Google's defense against the Justice Department's monopoly claims. Providing a video deposition for the landmark trial, Baker testified that Mozilla's popular browser Firefox tried to switch from using Google as a default search engine but reverted back after a "failed" bet on Yahoo made it clear that Google was Firefox users' preferred search engine.

According to Bloomberg , Mozilla's temporary switch to Yahoo is "the only situation in which a browser has switched the default search engine provider." This makes Baker's testimony potentially very powerful because it's a clear example that backs up Google's core argument that its search engine wins default status due to its quality, not due to anticompetitive behaviors.

"The evidence will show that the reasons behind Mozilla’s switch back to Google after selecting Yahoo as the default search engine for its Firefox browser confirms," Google's pre-trial brief said. "Google wins competitions that browser suppliers create for choosing their default search service by offering the best product at the best price. That is quintessential 'competition on the merits.'" In another court filing, Google argued , "there is no evidence of coercive conduct."

It's time for your periodic BIMI adoption status update.

A quick overview of what this is all about: BIMI is a standard being adopted by multiple internet services providers (ISPs) to allow the display of a sender's logo along side email messages, when displayed on a mobile device or in a webmail client. Some ISPs and mail clients have had a sender logo display function for a while now (one example is Gravatar ), but BIMI is an attempt to standardize and regulate this mechanism across the email ecosystem.

Adoption by senders seems a bit slow; but the spec only went public in 2019, which isn't that long ago. Also, it suffers a bit from the "chicken and egg" problem -- it's hard to convince senders to adopt the standard if receivers haven't adopted support for the standard. But now with two of the top three B2C mailbox providers (Yahoo and Gmail) having BIMI support, I'm guessing that we'll start to see more adoption of BIMI by senders.

Here's the current status of BIMI Support at large ISPs, email hosting and webmail providers:

1. Gmail: Yes, supports BIMI! Requires VMC. ( Find more info here .)
2. Yahoo (ex-Verizon): Yes, supports BIMI. Does not require VMC. ( More info here .)
3. Fastmail : Yes, supports BIMI! ( More info here .)
4. Considering BIMI Support: Comcast and Seznam.cz. ( More info here .)
5. Microsoft: Has no support for BIMI.

Gmail. In July 2020, Google announced their intent to support BIMI . In July 2021, Google announced that they were rolling out BIMI support over the coming weeks . Per the BIMI spec, Google requires that senders implement a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC), available from DigiCert or Entrust (and possibly others). It sounds like obtaining this VMC will require that a sender have trademarked their logo , which could be a significant barrier for smaller or hobbyist senders.

Yahoo (AOL/Yahoo/Verizon). Has support for BIMI. For a logo to display, the following conditions must be met: A BIMI record exists which points to a valid logo in SVG format, a DMARC policy of quarantine or reject is in place, the mailing is sent to large number of recipients (bulk mail), and they see sufficient reputation and engagement for the email address. They have a dedicated support page for BIMI and also have a contact address for questions/issues ( click here and search for "BIMI" on the page).

Microsoft Outlook.com (Hotmail). Microsoft has not announced any support for BIMI. A competing system called "brand cards" has likely been abandoned; multiple folks have told me that they have been unable to get enough information on how to implement a "brand card." There's no opportunity here at the present time, unfortunately. If that changes, I'll post an update.

So what should you do now? Here's what I would recommend large marketing senders do:

1. Make sure all email you send is authenticated with both SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) authentication. (All mail -- not just bulk or newsletter mail. Your ESP , corporate email platform (or both) should be able to help you do that.)
2. Implement DMARC, perhaps working with a vendor like dmarcian , Agari , Valimail , ProofPoint or Red Sift . (Disclaimer: I work for Kickbox , and we've got DMARC monitoring in our deliverability tool suite as well. I am a happy user of it myself!) Partnering with a vendor to provide monitoring and reporting helps you know whether or not it is safe to move on to the next step -- ensuring that you're not going to accidentally tell ISPs to block your legitimate mail.
3. Move to a restrictive "p=reject" DMARC policy after your DMARC reporting shows that you properly authenticate all of your mail streams. Don't do this just for the future logo opportunity -- do it because it makes it harder for bad guys to send fake mail pretending to be from your email domain name.
4. Trademark your logo and obtain a Verified Mark Certificate. Wondering what this whole VMC thing is all about? Here's a primer . Ready to obtain a VMC? You could go directly to DigiCert or Entrust, or look for help from Mailkit via their NOTAMIQ service or Red Sift.
5. Learn how to create the BIMI logo file. You can find more information here .
6. Understand that things are still developing. More ISPs could announce support in the future, and how they, or existing ISPs, will enforce the spec could evolve. Stay knowledgable and be flexible and be able to evolve.

Značky: #gmail, #microsoft, #bimi, #seznam, #comcast, #Network, #brandimage, #brandavatar, #verizon, #yahoo, #fastmail

And since Yahoo just announced that they are fully pulling out of China , you can consider that the final answer. That, as they say, is that.

I'm guessing that the resurrection I stumbled across in 2019 might have had something to do with the transition of Yahoo Mail's Chinese users to Alibaba ? But I don't have an easy way to confirm it, and at at this point, it doesn't really matter, as there's not much a sender can do about it today. (Were the Yahoo domains ever that big in China, anyway? I was always more concerned with delivery to qq.com, 163.com, 126.com, and a handful of others. Yahoo was never on my top domain list for China.)

Značky: #Network, #yahoo, #china

You did it! You got Yahoo or Microsoft to unblock you. Perhaps you even figured out why they "hate" you . Perhaps your friendly neighborhood deliverability consultant just closed the ticket you submitted, letting you know that the ISP has unblocked your sending IP address and telling you that you should now be "good to go."

So...now what? What should you do next? What should you send, how much, in what order? What's the best way to ramp things back up? This seems something that is missing from a lot of deliverability consultation -- the "now what?" after getting you unblocked. I sense an opportunity! Allow me to share my take on what you should do next, after getting unblocked by an ISP like Yahoo or Microsoft.

WAIT. Wait a period of time -- 24 hours if Yahoo, 48 hours if Microsoft, before doing any significant sending. (For other ISPs, wait until the next morning in US time.) Why? Because not all ISP spam filters update immediately. Most update overnight. Microsoft might only update every two days. You don't want to try to send until you're sure that the spam blocking has been removed. So, best to wait.

SPLIT. Split up your next sends. Don't immediately push the button to send one big send to six million people. Can you split that up? Over three days? Or in six batches, one every 12-18 hours? This will give you a chance to pause after a segment, if you notice the blocking recurring. It also flattens out the volume, making send volume look a bit more consistent instead of spiky. Do this ongoing, too. If you can split up future sends into chunks to launch throughout a day (or across multiple days), you slightly reduce the chances of blocking based just on volume spiking, especially at Microsoft domains. Microsoft hates volume spikes!

REVIEW. Something happened to cause that blocking. The ISP isn't guaranteeing that they won't block your mail again. If sending to a bad list is what caused the block before, sending to that bad list again is going to cause that blocking again. What can you review, and change, about what you're sending, to try to improve things? If you have a list segment that you know is iffy, that is something you should hold back on. Put it on pause, don't include it in the next send. It'll help reduce the chances of blocking recurring. This is an area where improvement almost always necessitates change.

FOCUS. Focusing on engaged subscribers is almost always a good thing to do. It helps to boost your sending reputation. Even at an ISP that doesn't directly look at engagement as a filtering metric, it'll still help. (Just a little more indirectly.) This means identifying people who haven't opened or clicked on any email from you in a long time, and stopping mail to those people. Suppress them, at least temporarily. What your date cutoff for engagement is varies based on industry (and is something of a moving target in the industry), but if you're not sure where to start, try six months. Meaning, if a person hasn't opened or clicked on an email from you in the last six months, stop sending to them. (Yes, Apple's Mail Privacy Protection leads us to a more complex discussion in the longer term, but today, this is still valuable.)

LEARN. Sign up for Microsoft SNDS . Sign up for Google Postmaster Tools . Use your favorite inbox monitoring suite to help capture and report on any and all bits of feedback. Use this to monitor. Now that you've gotten unblocked, and you're suppressing unengaged subscribers, and you've ditched that questionable list data, is your complaint rate going down in SNDS or GPT? Is your domain or IP reputation trending up? Feedback here helps you confirm that you're on the right path.

Of course, this is all pretty high level guidance. It's just the starting point, and different scenarios require different strategy to address. But I hope it gives you some idea of how to kick things off -- how best to recover after getting unblocked, and how to position yourself for success going forward. Hopefully these tips will help you to minimize the chances that you'll get blocked again immediately. Good luck and good sending!

Značky: #isps, #microsoft, #Network, #unblocking, #yahoo

(You might notice that this is a slightly-modified repost of previous content. It was necessary to deal with Blogger suddenly taking issue with a post containing a giant list of domains. Whoops.)

Looking to segment your email database based on ISP? Want to break out separate content or timing for Yahoo Mail versus Microsoft OLC versus Gmail subscribers? I’ve got you covered. Click here to download the full “MAGY” (Microsoft, AOL, Gmail, Yahoo) domain list , and feel free to use it for email segmentation. (And please don’t use it for spammy purposes.)

Notes: Yahoo (then Verizon) clarified for me earlier in 2021 that they do not own Yahoo Japan (.jp) -- they license the brand to someone else. So, the Yahoo-related .jp domains are hosted by a different entity, if you want to break those out separately. (I believe those would be yahoo.co.jp, yahoo.ne.jp, and ybb.ne.jp. I do not believe this includes aol.jp -- that domain's MX record seems to point at the typical Yahoo (non-JP) infrastructure.)

Methodology: I wrote a script to generate this list of domains, starting with the commonly known domain part choices for each provider, then I looked up the possible MX record for this domain under every possible country TLD. Meaning, I checked the MX for every possible version of yahoo.*, aol.*, hotmail.*, outlook.* and other variations where I know at least one of those variations hosts consumer webmail. (You can find the script here . Feel free to steal it and use it as a starting point to create a better version!)

I don't have absolute proof that every one of these domains actually houses consumer mailboxes for that given webmail provider, so the list for Yahoo and Microsoft might be a bit bigger than it needs to be. However, better safe than sorry, and there's probably no harm if a few extra domains, also seemingly hosted by each provider, end up in the mix.

Microsoft: A couple of the Microsoft domains are quite possibly not consumer webmail domains, but their domain name is similar enough to ones in use and the MX is hosted by them, so that was another case where I felt it was better to be over-inclusive rather than potentially leave out a few domains that should have been included.

Google: Remember that Google only has two consumer webmail domains: gmail.com and googlemail.com. When Gmail was initially launched in the UK and Germany, Google was unable to secure the "Gmail" trademark and was forced to use an alternate domain, giving us googlemail.com. This was resolved in the UK in 2010 and in Germany in 2012, but users can still receive mail at the "googlemail.com" version of their email address.

Yahoo: AOL and Yahoo were once separate entities, and then later they were combined by Verizon into a brand called “Oath,” later renamed Verizon Media . As of September 1, 2021 , both AOL and Yahoo mail is handled by a new corporate entity called Yahoo Inc.

Značky: #google, #aol, #yahoo, #magy, #gmail, #Network, #ispdomains, #reference, #microsoft

You can find their updated corporate website here , and you can see that the sale of Yahoo by Verizon Media to funds managed by Apollo Global Management was completed on September 1st.

So far, Yahoo's Postmaster blog has switched to the yahooinc domain, but the Postmaster site URL and Developer Network site URL remain unchanged. One assumes all will transition at some point soon.

Who hosts mail for verizon.net? Yahoo. We'll see if that changes at some point in the future, but for now, they still host mail for the same consumer mailbox domains today as compared to yesterday and best practice guidance for senders remains the same .

*** Whoops: My updating the list of past domains post to say "Yahoo" instead of "Verizon" resulted in Blogger flagging that post for spam, for some silly reason, so I've got no link to that at the moment. Thanks, Blogger. Check the website later -- I'll get the domain list reposted very soon.

Značky: #yahoo, #verizon, #isps, #news, #Network

It's been a while since I've posted a BIMI status update, and things are changing! Things are standardizing! Things are getting good. So, let's get right to it...

BIMI, if you do not remember, is a new standard being adopted by multiple internet services providers (ISPs) to allow the display of a sender's logo along side email messages, when displayed on a mobile device or in a webmail client. Some ISPs and mail clients have had a sender logo display function for a while now (one example is Gravatar ), but BIMI attempts to standardize and regulate this process across the email ecosystem.

Here's the current status of BIMI Support at large ISPs, email hosting and webmail providers:

1. Verizon: Yes, supports BIMI.
2. Gmail: Yes, supports BIMI! Requires VMC. Find more info here .
3. Fastmail : Noted as having support ( here ) but I have no more details at this time.
4. Considering BIMI Support: Comcast and Seznam.cz. ( More info here .)
5. Microsoft: No support announced.

Verizon Media (AOL/Yahoo/Verizon). Has support for BIMI. For a logo to display, the following conditions must be met: A BIMI record exists which points to a valid logo in SVG format, a DMARC policy of quarantine or reject is in place, the mailing is sent to large number of recipients (bulk mail), and they see sufficient reputation and engagement for the email address. They also have a contact address for questions/issues ( click here and search for "BIMI" on the page).

Gmail. In July 2020, Google announced their intent to support BIMI . In July 2021, Google announced that they were rolling out BIMI support over the coming weeks . Per the BIMI spec, Google requires that senders implement a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC), available from DigiCert or Entrust (and possibly others). It sounds like obtaining this VMC will require that a sender have trademarked their logo , which could be a significant barrier for smaller or hobbyist senders.

Microsoft Outlook.com (Hotmail). Microsoft has not announced any support for BIMI. A competing system called "brand cards" has possibly been abandoned; multiple folks have told me that they have been unable to get enough information on how to implement a "brand card." There's no opportunity here at the present time, unfortunately.

So what should you do now? Here's what I would recommend large marketing senders do:

1. Make sure all email you send is authenticated with both SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) authentication. (All mail -- not just bulk or newsletter mail. Your ESP , corporate email platform (or both) should be able to help you do that.)
2. Implement DMARC, perhaps working with a vendor like Agari , Valimail , ProofPoint or Red Sift . A DMARC-savvy email security vendor can help you properly configure email authentication, configure DMARC failure monitoring, show you how to read DMARC failure reporting, and give you confidence that you're not going to break anything if you implement a restrictive DMARC policy.
3. Move to a restrictive "p=reject" DMARC policy after your DMARC reporting shows that you properly authenticate all of your mail streams. Don't do this just for the future logo opportunity -- do it because it makes it harder for bad guys to send fake mail pretending to be from your email domain name.
4. Trademark your logo and obtain a Verified Mark Certificate. You could go directly to DigiCert or Entrust, or look for help from Mailkit via their NOTAMIQ service or Red Sift.
5. Understand that things are still developing. More ISPs could announce support in the future, and how they, or existing ISPs, will enforce the spec could evolve. Stay knowledgable and be flexible and able to evolve.

Značky: #yahoo, #seznam, #bimi, #fastmail, #verizon, #comcast, #Network, #microsoft, #gmail