New from Validity: The Heatwave Domain Blocklist

Validity just launched something very interesting: the Heatwave Domain Blocklist, and the goal is to identify and measure reputation of domains engaged in “synthetic warming” (automated exchanges between controlled mailboxes designed to make a young domain look trustworthy) and “active cold outreach” (live cold campaigning to real recipients). Find their press release here.My take: Because this is targeting cold email / bulk outreach services, it will end up making their customers, and the cold mail sent, easier to identify and filter or block. Mailbox providers were already doing this to some degree. Cold email is ultimately unsolicited, and at bulk, it becomes Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE), a textbook definition of spam. Mailbox providers do often catch this at scale. Some invariably sneaks through the filtering, but MBPs know that this mail makes their users unhappy; thus, they don’t really intentionally want to deliver that kind of mail to the inbox.Messaging industry anti-abuse…