Did you know? : Omeda is a member of M3AAWG – the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group. This tightly controlled group of professionals meet and connect regularly to seek to keep the bad actors off of the internet, the spammers out of email and protect the mobile environment from messaging abuse. The membership encompasses ISP’s, ESP’s, telecom’s, anti-virus vendors, security vendors and more. The folks at Spamhaus are large contributors. As a working group, we strive to exchange information and publish best-practices documents. Please take the time to visit their website as there are helpful resources. Some of the information is more confidential, but it allows us to help our client community behind the scenes. As this is an anti-abuse working group, the motto is “what happens at M3AAWG, stays at M3AAWG”. Information has to be protected and not released for the bad actors and spammers to consume.
M3AAWG has many committees: technical, abuse, academic, public policy, etc. Omeda’s Jill Newman is currently a co-chair on the Senders Committee. This is where all of the ESP’s collaborate on best practices and also exchange information or issues we may encounter when sending to the major ISP’s.
Jill just spent 4 days at the fall meeting and participated in sessions related to GDPR, DMARC authentication, data analytics, issues encountered with the ISP’s, and even a session from Microsoft on their email security perspective. There was also the on-going discussion with the security vendors and their practices of clicking links during the smtp conversation to verify the URL’s are legit and not landing on malware sites. While Omail does have metrics that suppress many of those clicks from your reports, the Email Success team has been working with many of our clients that continue to see this escalation of click activity that was not performed by the end recipient, their customer. No security vendor or ISP will ever reveal their “secret sauce” for why they are doing the clicking or why the email is placed into the spam folder versus the InBox. Membership in M3AAWG allows an exchange of ideas which we in turn can use to help our clients get the best ROI on their email sending!
