Overview
00:00:24 Meet MJ Sohn y’all!
00:01:36 We are living in Terminator John Connor
00:11:42 Human led quality assurance is still needed
00:24:09 Humans will need to band together to learn from each other
[00:00:00] Eric Trinidad: Welcome to Email’s Not Dead, your email podcast for everything for email by email geeks. My name is We- my name is Wereic. my name is Eric. and my partner in crime, the taco to my salsa, Jonathan “JT” Torres.
What’s up, man? How are you?
[00:00:20] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Oh, man. Your intros, they get me every time, Eric.
[00:00:24] Eric Trinidad: Yeah. It, it’s been too long, man. It’s been too long. I feel like, well, we, we need to start getting back in track and back on track, too, and not also in track. But man, can’t do nothing today. Talk about email and you know, I think it’s an appropriate time.
I feel like, you know, we’re getting more and more disconnected, and what appropriate time to talk about AI. We have a special guest with us this week, MJ Sohn senior email devel- deliverbi- deliverability specialist at Shopify. MJ, what’s up?
[00:00:55] MJ Sohn: Hi. I wish that was my title.
[00:01:00] Jonathan “JT” Torres: We’re gonna get it eventually.
Like, Eric just needs to get those words processing.
[00:01:03] Eric Trinidad: Yeah.
[00:01:04] Thomas “T-Bird” Knierien: There’s a lot of dust on everything.
[00:01:07] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Look, we’re here talking about robots today, so it’s gonna be a lot of, you know, like, he needs that boot up time. He’s just what, you know, he’s a machine from the 1900s, so he’s got- Yeah
he’s gotta- you know, start it up slow.
[00:01:18] Eric Trinidad: There’s a lot of, like, clicks and whistles and stuff, not just in my knees, but like…
[00:01:24] Thomas “T-Bird” Knierien: Go ahead and reboot there.
[00:01:25] Eric Trinidad: Yeah. It’s just like that.
[00:01:29] MJ Sohn: Well, thank you so much for having me.
[00:01:31] Jonathan “JT” Torres: It’s awesome. I’m glad we have you on finally.
[00:01:36] Eric Trinidad: Yeah. it’s been a long time coming.
we met you way back in the day in the Bay, um-
So robots, AI, what’s going on? What’s happening? Are they still taking over? Like, what… I don’t know.
What’s
[00:01:49] MJ Sohn: happening? We’re, like, actively living the movie “Terminator,” on our way to the ships right now.
[00:01:55] Thomas “T-Bird” Knierien: I think we are. We talk a lot about on this podcast actually, so that’s-
this is an appropriate place.
[00:02:01] MJ Sohn: I’m hoping, like, final destination would be, like, “Star Trek.” That would be, like, the ideal, but I think that’s probably- Like 4,000 years away.
Oh,
[00:02:11] Eric Trinidad: You said “Final Destination” and my mind immediately went to like logs falling off the back of a truck and like hitting people.
You know, that’s the final destination I thought about. But I feel like it’s more appropriate for what we’re talking about today and how like we’re always being attacked, it feels like, by you know, what’s going on in, in the email space. But now we have smarter attackers utilizing AI.
[00:02:32] MJ Sohn: That’s right.
I think we talk a lot, or at least there’s a lot of press on how AI is being used to accelerate projects and tech, and what we’re seeing is like the underbelly of that and how that’s being used by abusers to accelerate malicious activity, and that’s been changing the email landscape pretty dramatically in the last few years.
Um, so my position at Shopify what we do is we’re kind of like a data processor position, and I think like Mailgun, you’re kind of in that same position too, where it’s like we’re not exactly like the marketers that are sending, but we help with the sending process. So we’re that in-between layer between the sender and the recipient.
So it’s that protective layer that the mail goes through.
[00:03:24] Eric Trinidad: Right.
[00:03:24] MJ Sohn: And I think that’s the perspective that we’re gonna talk about on the podcast today, and what we see trying to come through and what we’re trying to protect from. And yeah, I think the biggest change that we’ve seen is the abuse pattern and what that looks like has changed.
So like back in the day, at least when I was starting out in email deliverability, like- 12 years ago, we were looking at spammy behavior and IP reputation and what mailbox providers were looking for, and if this brand new IP sees a huge surge of volume, they’ll block that.
And like the theory and understanding behind that is like the spam behavior at that time was a new entity would be purchased, a huge burst of volume would be attempted, and if they get away with it, awesome, and they’ll use it until they get caught, and then they’ll move on to another IP.
But it was like pretty manual, pretty slow-ish, at least comparatively to now. And since then, we’ve seen like IP reputation change to domain reputation with shared IPs being like the new norm. And that was a pretty big shift for the email industry, too. And now we’re seeing like even further Just this like, instead of like huge volume surges from one sending entity, what they’re doing now is like instead of a million emails from one shot, they might try to just send out like 1,000 emails across 1,000 different profiles.
So they’ll just kind of fly under the radar, more of like a swarm kind of spam shape rather than like huge spikes that we’re used to seeing.
[00:05:19] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, Eric. I feel you were gonna say something.
[00:05:22] Eric Trinidad: No, I was gonna say something, but I feel like it was gonna take it in a different direction.
I feel like- … you’re more on track. you rebooted right before you got on, so.
[00:05:31] Jonathan “JT” Torres: You’re still in that process. I get it.
[00:05:34] Eric Trinidad: Yeah Still processing.
[00:05:35] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Looking back a little bit, I’ve been here eight years-
and we’ve evolved a little bit, but even before that, like where I came from and where Eric came from was a mailbox provider, and we were kinda doing the same kinda stuff, right? Like it’s looking at helping out. We did a lot of support tech stuff. Like, you know, “I can’t get into my mailbox.”
Yeah. There’s that, but then there’s also the aspect of like trying to protect the system with what an individual’s doing. And then not only from the sending perspective, but from the recipient perspective as well. So like what email is coming in, you know, what does that look like? And then transitioning into this space where it is a lot of the platform that is doing the sending, and we’re the intermediary where we’re just getting the information from our customer now who’s sending through our platform.
Who’s to stop those people? Like that, that’s us. The bad actors- … that are coming in trying to use it in a bad way. It’s a lot of change in perspective of it’s one person doing it. It’s maybe one person with some machines helping them out in, you know, being able to write a code and get a whole bunch of accounts booted up, you know?
We still have the attackers that are looking to compromise accounts and use a legitimate sender’s information and use their reputation to get stuff out. And then- now I think that’s even evolved even more where you get that swarm effect of now they’re trying to compromise multiple accounts and send little things
under the radar and stuff like that. It’s gotten a lot I don’t wanna say more difficult, but we have to be creative. I know that’s what we’re talking about here today, is like how we can get creative in trying to stop that and, you know, what are the levers that we’re trying to pull and, you know, we’re not gonna give away all the secret sauce, so if you’re listening for the secret sauce, I’m sorry.
But, Come see us … maybe you can come up with some ideas.
[00:07:12] MJ Sohn: Hire some creative people.
[00:07:14] Eric Trinidad: Yeah.
[00:07:15] MJ Sohn: Yeah. ‘Cause you’re so right, like creativity is a huge element to this, and like I work with so many incredible engineers, and the ones that are really shining are the ones that are creative and able to think, like, ahead of what the spammers might be trying or testing.
And leveraging machine learning so that like, because our traditional method of like taking a data set towards like a data scientist and having them analyze the data for a week and coming back and saying like, “These are the patterns that we’re seeing.” It’s like now that’s happening in minutes
with AI agents, which is crazy. But that’s the speed that we have to work at now, ’cause the spammers are also using AI agents to like machine learn our systems and our fraud triggers and try and get around them. So we have to move at their speed or faster, and creativity allows us to take jumps and leaps around them.
One low-hanging example would be, let’s say in the past there might have been like- DHL phish, like that’s really common.
So maybe there’s like one sender entity and they send like a million DHL phishing emails.
But now, and like the email, the from email might be like dhl@gmail.com, whatever. But now it’s like dhl+1@gmail.com, dhl+2. And it’s like now we have to know like what kind of things can we ID that they’re trying to hide but is actually common from all of this swarm, you know?
Like- what kind of signals can we find? And it’s amazing to look at the signals that our trust teams are looking. Like it’s just the most interesting, creative, obscure things that hopefully you would never think of doing or checking. But we’ve seen with data that like, okay, real senders are doing this super weird random specific thing that they would wanna do ’cause they’re real senders.
Whereas spammers, because they wanna be fast and cheap- … they’ll try and skip some of those things that like organic normal users might try to do.
[00:09:41] Jonathan “JT” Torres: I think that’s also a thing that has evolved, and I know that’s something that, that we keep talking about in the space in general, where AI is helping those spammers, the people trying to do the bad thing, like look more legitimate.
you know, and, and it makes that, even that part of it more difficult. And I know that’s one of the things where we have everybody in this space I think has adopted into like, okay, like we need to get even further into it. We need to get like down into the data level stuff, and try to scope things out from there because it, it does. But going back into like the, you know, early 2000s, late ’90s, you see the, the spam emails that are being sent and everything’s like just really improperly formatted. Like you can barely read the message because it’s written so poorly it just looks wrong. And now with AI it, it looks good.
[00:10:24] MJ Sohn: It looks amazing.
[00:10:25] Eric Trinidad: Yeah.
Yeah. It looks so legit.
[00:10:27] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Yeah.
[00:10:29] MJ Sohn: Better than what the actual brands are putting out.
[00:10:30] Eric Trinidad: Yeah. Yeah.
Like, “Oh, this deal actually is too good to pass up. Let me get in there,” you know? Like
[00:10:38] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Yeah, but it is one of those things where you have to do it a little bit different and you have to go a little bit further to do it because it’s getting so good. I think overall, like that’s the thing that we wanna look at is or you should be looking at those things.
Look at it in what you’re doing. Make sure that you have all the right stuff. I think as a sender, that’s the thing that you should still be doing. Like make it- look as good as possible. Make sure you’re doing everything you can to make sure that you’re doing it the right way.
And that might mean a bunch of different things. I don’t wanna get into too many specifics because every brand, every sender, you know, everybody does things a little bit differently. So just make sure you continue doing that. Always scope it out. Don’t get passive. Don’t let AI do the work for you.
Make sure you’re looking at it, double check it, do it. Because if not, you can get in trouble of being caught with those things because this is the evolution that we’ve all had to make. We all have to look for that now also. so just a fair warning there.
[00:11:24] Eric Trinidad: This goes back to a lot of the things that we’ve been talking about. A kind, a continuous through line of a lot of our conversations of like, it used to work back then. I’m still doing the same things. Why isn’t it working now? And we gotta get out of that mindset and we gotta, you know, get with the times essentially you know, as we continue moving on.
[00:11:42] MJ Sohn: Yeah. Jonathan, to your point of like, we can’t just let AI take the wheel with this because the risk is like so high for something to go wrong. And for like us especially, we don’t want to burn our real customers because we decided that like- Something looked suspicious. Let’s say like, the product name has, you know, like, “Pay now on PayPal,” which sounds so sketchy, but there’s actually, like, a lot of legitimate senders that have that. It’s like, because they want to be paid on their PayPal account. Like, that’s a real thing. And so, like, we can’t just like, even if, even if we blocked on that, and even if that caught like 99% of the spammers that was using that tactic, like that 1% of real senders that was doing it that would suddenly get caught on our net, like what happens to their business?
And that could be their livelihood, that could be their mortgage payment. Like that is a big deal. So we do need a human intervention to like review the rules, look at the false positives. It does like, yes, every minute that we take to slow down and check the rules is a minute that the spammers have to like keep sending, but you gotta really look at the trade-offs.
And in this game of Whac-A-Mole, sometimes it’s like, okay, you let some of those moles get through and your breaking point line or your SLO or whatever might have to shift. So maybe it’s like some of those smaller mailbox providers might start blocking you. Maybe that’s not like your red light critical moment, you know?
Like maybe it has to get a little more serious because we can’t move as fast all the time.
[00:13:46] Jonathan “JT” Torres: You know, as we were talking about the subject and as we continue to evolve it, it is one of those things where it’s like, how much risk can you take on?
Part of that conversation to me always includes making sure that we’re doing the new stuff, making sure that we’re doing the right thing to continue moving the bar forward and keeping up with some of these spammers in the way that they do things. But there’s still like the old tools that will help out in a lot of those situations, too.
And, and some of those old tools do include just the human element. You know, review, look, create rules that are gonna be static on the system.
[00:14:14] MJ Sohn: Double opt-in. Everyone hates… marketers hate double opt-in. But like that would actually solve so much.
[00:14:26] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Yes.
[00:14:27] MJ Sohn: That would actually solve so much.
[00:14:28] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Yeah. It does.
[00:14:30] MJ Sohn: It’s like, it’s that asymmetric friction that we’re trying to introduce. It’s like, what can legitimate senders and recipients do that fake ones can’t?
And it’s like email verification It’s the double opt-in. It’s like, “I actually do want this mail,” and that would prevent list bombing or inbox bombing that I’m sure everyone’s cousin, uncle, auntie has experienced where, like, their email got leaked and now they have 9,000 emails in their inbox and they missed that one bank alert that said suspicious activity. It’s happening.
[00:15:11] Jonathan “JT” Torres: It’s amusing to me how hard it is for people to do the double opt-in. Like, they, they just don’t want it. Like, people do not want to do it from the sender perspective. And it’s so unfortunate to me because it would solve so many things.
I know I like seeing it whenever I sign up for a message, but I know I’m in the email space. But I know there’s other people who are not in the email space that would appreciate something like that, a double opt-in to have an immediate oh man, I’m forgetting the word. What do we call this thing?
Like to opt into cadence and what streams you wanna be a part of. You know, like a-
[00:15:45] Eric Trinidad: Like a preference?
[00:15:46] Thomas “T-Bird” Knierien: The preference center?
[00:15:47] Jonathan “JT” Torres: A preference center. A pref- Yeah. Thank you. Yes, exactly right. Like, just give me a preference center right away. I’m here. I’m working in email. I love email.
I love my email mailbox. So I curate it. I go in there and look. I’m constantly checking my email. I wanna make sure I’m, I’m caught up with stuff. But I know people in the space, maybe even here on this call today, that have like thousands of messages in their mailbox. Thomas.
[00:16:11] Eric Trinidad: Not to name names.
[00:16:13] MJ Sohn: I know everyone talks about it, and in the deliverability space, like we understand, like email is a relationship, and in a relationship It’s a conversation and you care about what the other person wants. And if you’re scared of implementing a double opt-in, it’s like, get your email program together.
Like, if you’re scared of a double opt-in, you don’t believe in your game. Like, you don’t have anything real to offer, clearly, ’cause you’re afraid-
of what that’s gonna do to your email program, and guess what? They don’t want your emails. That’s the reality. So look in the mirror.
[00:16:47] Eric Trinidad: No, that’s so good.
[00:16:48] MJ Sohn: I am not a marketer.
[00:16:49] Eric Trinidad: Oh my god.
[00:16:50] Thomas “T-Bird” Knierien: MJ Sohn said, “You ain’t, your marketing program ain’t got game.”
[00:16:54] MJ Sohn: Yeah.
If you’re scared of a double opt-in,
fix your email program.
[00:17:00] Thomas “T-Bird” Knierien: Dang.
[00:17:00] Eric Trinidad: That’s awesome. I think that’s something that I talk about so much like with my clients. I tell them, like, it really is a relationship, and I feel like sometimes, to hear you also validate that is just, it makes me feel good because I’m always just like, you know, you just wanna always like kinda check in, see how they’re feeling, what are you doing, are you doing the things that are right?
Are you making sure that, one, you’re, you’re sending them messages that are curated for them, and that you’re calling them the right name? ‘Cause, you know-
[00:17:27] MJ Sohn: What a dream.
[00:17:27] Eric Trinidad: You know? Call your wife the wrong name or your ex-girlfriend’s name, you know, once. See how well that relationship goes.
[00:17:37] MJ Sohn: How did that go for you, Eric?
[00:17:38] Eric Trinidad: Yeah.
I’m just saying, I know people that it’s happened. Present company excluded.
[00:17:45] Jonathan “JT” Torres: We, we all know people. I think you never use one of these examples.
[00:17:49] Thomas “T-Bird” Knierien: There’s a reason why Eric lives in the guest room now.
[00:17:55] Eric Trinidad: Yeah. Just kidding. It’s ’cause of my back. It’s not anything else.
But but yeah, no, that, it’s awesome to hear. And yeah, hopefully people will take you know, take that lead as well, so.
[00:18:06] Jonathan “JT” Torres: One of the things to, as a reminder for this is that us as the platform, and, you know, Mailgun, I will say as the platform, and, you know, like everything that we do from our side, we’re trying to protect it.
We don’t like people getting caught in the rules that we have when they’re trying to do something legitimately. So that is one of the steps and we do say that, but then there’s also the platform itself which can get caught in those things. Like we, we have shared IPs that we utilize for a lot of our senders.
And if a bad person comes onto that and we fail to catch them, you know, hopefully fingers crossed, we keep being as good as we are to do catch them eventually. Like we do it. Sometimes it takes a little bit, but we do have that bad actor that can come through- the way to do it, and, and this is the conversation that we’re having, right?
So this is why we’re talking about the double opt-in, the doing the right things with an email, because you have to make your own email stream as resilient as possible to not getting caught up within that. It’s a balance of what you’re trying to do and what we’re trying to do and, and everything that’s going on within that.
But the more resilient you can make your own sending, listening to this best practice advice, doing the things that you can to do it, like it just helps you to be able to get through. You know so just a heads up on that. That’s why we bring up a topic, even within this conversation of like AI and what’s going on within the world.
Getting back into like the whole, like sending aspect of it and the protection of the platform, like I know it’s an ever-evolving space.
Like, where do you feel like you’re at with it? Like MJ, from your side, like are, are you guys in that process? Or you guys feel like you’re way, like winning the game?
[00:19:40] MJ Sohn: No.
[00:19:40] Jonathan “JT” Torres: To say that. I wouldn’t…
[00:19:43] MJ Sohn: Well, yeah, I don’t know how much I’m allowed to talk about-
specifically, but like maybe as an indus- like let’s talk about it as an industry.
[00:19:52] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Yeah.
[00:19:52] MJ Sohn: I think like
Something that came up in industry conversations maybe a year or two ago was this conversation of like, “Oh my God, all of these bot signups that we are now seeing.” And like, not just now seeing, but are now realizing have been bloating our lists for the last two years, and, “Oh my God, now what do we do with years of the…”
‘Cause, you know, it got to a breaking point where things were starting to fall down and we investigated. It’s like, okay, well suddenly, you know, magic123@gmail.com requested 5,000 password reset emails in the last hour. That’s not real. And then suddenly we realize, like, magic123@gmail.com has been requesting 100 password resets per hour for the last two years, but that was, like, low enough that we weren’t seeing it.
It’s just- We’re discovering new things and old things.
Like things that spammers have been doing that we’re like, “Holy shit, now we’re seeing it,” or, “Now we’re noticing it ’cause it’s getting to a breaking point.”
So, I don’t know if there’s, like, a winning or losing battle-
but it’s definitely a battle.
It’s an exciting one. I love it. I’m obsessed. It’s really taken over my entire personality.
[00:21:35] Eric Trinidad: Yeah. It’s ever-evolving, right? It’s, I mean, it just like-
[00:21:38] MJ Sohn: Ever-evolving.
It’s ever-evolving. It comes from, like, places you would never imagine. Like look at your traffic from Denmark. Like, it’s so weird.
Like, it’s places where traditionally you wouldn’t have seen spam, you know?
And, like, regional is an interesting topic too, because… I’m going on a different tangent. It’s like- when you’re looking at spam signals, and we were talking about that, like, 1% exception with that, like, pay through your PayPal now as example.
Exceptions that we’re finding tend to also be very regional, so I do wanna say that out loud for people building their systems. It’s like what might work really well at catching spammers in North America might have, like, a really disproportionate high false positive rate in another region that you wouldn’t expect.
So just, like, when examining your false positive data, like, make sure that you splice that ’cause it’s not distributed evenly. You’ll find weird clumps, and you’re, like, you really wanna find out where those false positives are clumping so that you can make bypasses, exceptions, and account for them.
[00:23:00] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Yeah, that’s good advice.
That’s good advice. I think overall too, that kind of brings in a slightly different part of the conversation to me where it’s like we talked about it a little bit at the beginning, and I, I had this thought then, so I’m glad we’re circling back around. But it’s I feel like we had early, like way back, you know, like there’s, there’s somebody who wanted to, to do this bad thing with an email, and it would take a little bit.
There was a, there was an entry point, like you had to have a certain amount of knowledge in order to do it. And I feel like that is changing too, like, which is also you know, shifting things a lot because now maybe you don’t have to have the exact email knowledge, you don’t have to have the exact technical knowledge, but maybe you’re really good at crafting a bad message that, you know, a message that would deceive somebody.
Now you can use these different AI tools and things like that to get into that. I guess the barrier for entry is a little lower. Um- Mm. But the-
[00:23:54] MJ Sohn: I want to say lower.
[00:23:56] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Yeah.
[00:23:56] MJ Sohn: I want to say lower.
[00:23:57] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Yeah.
[00:23:58] MJ Sohn: Because, like, we need really smart, qualified people.
[00:24:04] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Yeah.
[00:24:05] MJ Sohn: The barrier to entry is different, you know? I think-
[00:24:08] Jonathan “JT” Torres: There we go. Yeah.
[00:24:09] MJ Sohn: And I’m just talking out of my ass and maybe a little controversially here. But I think, like, let’s be real, but a lot of the email specialists have gate kept email deliverability expertise, you know? And I think because the technology is older and a lot of people were there when it was, like, getting built and were involved in the RFCs and, like, creating the email space, and you couldn’t compete with that, you know? You just had to be around in that time, like physically-alive with your career going. And that’s not possible for younger generations to have that experience. But, like, the industry needs creative people with the energy, with different expertise that can use these MLs and AI tools and look at all of the different data points using different contexts and everything else that’s available.
Like, we need to evolve and allow our experts to evolve and the industry to change.
[00:25:36] Jonathan “JT” Torres: That’s a great point because it is one of those things. I mean, even in general, I know this is we’re getting more into a little side over, outside of email.
But it is one of those things where you do have to have that, balance of things, right? It, it can’t just be like everybody old school and doing it the traditional way. You have to have that new school of thinking. And even when it comes to the security side of it, like you do have to have people that are old school, think about it in a traditional way, but what are the new people coming in?
What are they doing? You know? I’m, I’m on the old side. I’ll readily admit, like, my ideas are not always fresh in the way to do it, but I have to rely on those that are coming in and what are they thinking, what are they doing? How do they see that in more perspective?
Because it is, it’s important. And you have to have both because whether you like it or not, it’s already out there. Like there’s- I’m sure there’s some 20-year-old right now trying to find a way to, you know, gain some money by scamming some people through an email message.
[00:26:23] MJ Sohn: Those 20-year-olds are brilliant.
[00:26:24] Eric Trinidad: Oh, yeah.
[00:26:25] MJ Sohn: Yeah. I have like a mentor relationship with someone that is 25 and a project manager, and they mentor me because the way that their brain works and the way they, they look at things, and I’m like on these like old, old, old systems like I don’t even wanna admit, like
[00:26:49] Thomas “T-Bird” Knierien: Admit it. Admit it.
[00:26:51] MJ Sohn: Like, “Let me just open up my Word doc.”
And they’re like, “What are you talking about?” Yeah. Well, what, what are,
[00:26:58] Thomas “T-Bird” Knierien: What are they using if they’re not using Word docs?
[00:27:01] MJ Sohn: Well, I’ve got a… Yeah. Anyway, I’m not gonna-
[00:27:03] Jonathan “JT” Torres: I’ll do the same thing. I’ll be like- “Look, look at this code inside of Atom. Oh, you can’t even download Atom anymore? Like, it doesn’t exist?
Okay, cool.”
[00:27:11] Eric Trinidad: I think I got y’all beat. Let’s get something else. I’m still using paper and pencil. Wow.
[00:27:15] MJ Sohn: Oh. What’s that?
[00:27:15] Eric Trinidad: Yeah. I mean, just throwing it out there.
[00:27:21] MJ Sohn: Put that in an envelope and mail it?
[00:27:22] Eric Trinidad: Yeah.
[00:27:23] MJ Sohn: Incredible. Yeah. But we need, we need all kinds. We need all kinds because senders are evolving, spammers are evolving.
We need to evolve to adapt to those needs and changes.
[00:27:38] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
[00:27:41] Eric Trinidad: I think that that’s a good place to kinda, kinda leave it and maybe leave it open for, like, another conversation with you, MJ.
I think that, you know, having you come back and us further talking about this and, and how, you know, Abuse Desk is using things and what you’re seeing and kind of like maybe, like, a little bit down the line, we see, like, how the rest of the year has gone for y’all and how’s things changed, you know?
I think that’d be kinda cool to kinda come back and talk about. But, you know, realizing that we need to adopt and change, but then also relying on the old things like list hygiene double opt-in, getting consent. We always talk about it, you know?
[00:28:16] MJ Sohn: You know what’s been really amazing?
[00:28:18] Eric Trinidad: What’s that?
[00:28:19] MJ Sohn: Is analyzing spam cop complaints.
Yeah. I will be the first to admit that back in the day, I just looked at numbers in aggregate and be like, “Oh, a spam cop complaint came in.”
It’ll be delisted in 24 hours.
[00:28:38] Eric Trinidad: Yeah.
[00:28:39] MJ Sohn: But it’s like… But like– Oh no, that’s a trap. But like- That’s a trap. But like the spam cop complaints Like, you should look at them, and you should look at who’s complaining, and, and you start to see…
And it’s usually, like, people whose email addresses have been leaked. And it’s like that intersection of their email got leaked, and they’re very vocal about it. So they’ll make a Spamcop report. But they’re so vocal about it, and they’re consistent, so they’ll tell you every single time they get an email they didn’t want.
And now you start to track that pattern of where their email was leaked, and you start to see, oh, this is interesting, and what can we find in common about the emails that they’re complaining on, even though they might be different senders.
[00:29:36] Eric Trinidad: Oh, right on.
[00:29:37] MJ Sohn: Yeah. That– I, I have been really surprised by how much we’ve discovered from just looking at Spamcop complaints.
So I wanna-
[00:29:48] Eric Trinidad: Dang …
[00:29:48] MJ Sohn: leave that with y’all.
[00:29:50] Eric Trinidad: No, that’s awesome. That’s awesome.
[00:29:51] MJ Sohn: Yeah.
[00:29:52] Eric Trinidad: That, that’s definitely something that I think I’ve slept on as well, so, you know, that’s-
[00:29:56] MJ Sohn: I was too.
[00:29:56] Eric Trinidad: Yeah. Yeah. That’s cool, though. That’s cool. Well, MJ, th- that’s– I think that’s amazing, and I’d love to talk to you more about and bring you back on, you know, just for, for more conversations like this, if you’d be down.
Like, we’re down, definitely.
[00:30:11] MJ Sohn: Love that.
[00:30:12] Eric Trinidad: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:30:16] MJ Sohn: Consent.
[00:30:16] Eric Trinidad: Yeah. Right on.
Well, where… If, if you have more ideas or, or more thoughts and people wanna get in touch with you,
[00:30:22] MJ Sohn: Yeah, to get in touch with me. LinkedIn works. LinkedIn works.
[00:30:26] Eric Trinidad: Right on. Right on.
Yeah.
[00:30:28] MJ Sohn: Or I’m on the Email Geek Slack channel and a few other Slack channels in the industry, so-
Nice. Nice … look me up. Shout out Email Geeks- Heck yeah
Slack channel. Right on. And then I guess, Thomas, where can folks, if they wanna hear more about this, and where can they find us?
[00:30:43] Thomas “T-Bird” Knierien: Yeah. You can find us more over at mailgun.com/resources/podcast, and also on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Shop, all that fun stuff. Also, if, if we have any other related links to Shopify or anything deliverability or some of the stuff that MJ has talked about, we’ll have that featured on the show links as well, so.
But we’re super thankful that after all the times we’ve hung out at M3AAWG, that we finally got to do this episode with MJ, so we’re grateful.
[00:31:13] MJ Sohn: This was great. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:31:16] Eric Trinidad: Thank you so much for coming on. Appreciate you.
And yeah, till next time, everybody.
