Here we are again, continuing our swim through the alphabet soup of deliverability acronyms, jargon, abbreviations and initialisms. This week we’re diving into E through P with 22 more definitions that will have you speaking like an Email Pro in no time.
| TERM | DEFINITION |
|---|---|
| ECOA | Email Change of Address - a service that tracks and updates email address changes. |
| EHLO | Extended HELO - a email server command that identifies the originating email server and starts the SMTP conversation that enables an email to be transmitted. |
| ESP | Email Service Provider - A service company that offers bulk email services for clients. |
| FBL | Feedback Loop - a service that some ISPs offer that sends recipient spam complaints back to the sender so they may remove the complaining email addresses from their active mailing file. |
| GDPR | General Data Protection Regulation - an EU law that provides data protection and privacy for all EU citizens. GDPR also regulates the transfer of personal data outside of the EU. |
| GPT | Google Postmaster Tools - a dashboard tool that lets high volume commercial email senders analyze their email performance and troubleshoot Gmail delivery issues. |
| HELO | An email server command that identifies the originating email server and starts the SMTP conversation that enables an email to be transmitted. |
| HTML | Hypertext Markup Language - The coding that makes web pages human readable and pretty. In the early days of the internet email was only sent in plain text. Internet purists at the time thought that sending email in HTML would be the end of the internet. |
| IETF | The Internet Engineering Task Force is an open standards organization, which develops and promotes voluntary Internet standards, in particular the standards that comprise the Internet protocol suite. It has no formal membership or membership requirements. |
| IMAP | Internet Message Access Protocol - a standard protocol used by email clients to fetch email from an email server and allows the user to view and keep the emails on the server. |
| ISP | Internet Service Provider - an organization that provides services for accessing the internet. Usually also provides email services in addition to connectivity. |
| M3AAWG | The Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group - an industry group that works against bots, malware, spam, viruses, DoS attacks and other online exploitation. |
| MBP | Mailbox Provider - an organization that provides email services but not internet connectivity. |
| MIME | Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension - an Internet standard that extends the format of email to support: text in character sets other than ASCII, Non-text attachments: audio, video, images, application programs etc. |
| MTA | Mail Transfer Agent - software that transfers email messages from one server to another using SMTP. |
| MUA | Mail User Agent - software that enables a computer user to retrieve email from a server. A MUA can be an email client like Outlook or a web service like Gmail. |
| MX | Mail Exchange Record - a DNS record that provides the routing information needed to get email delivered to specific domains. |
| PGP | Pretty Good Privacy - an encryption program that provides privacy and authentication through cryptography. PGP can be used to secure email transmissions, files and hard drives. |
| Phishing | Criminal and fraudulent activity that attempts to steal sensitive data such as usernames , passwords and credit card information by posing as a trustworthy entity. |
| PII | Personal Identifiable Information |
| PMTA | PowerMTA - a commercial MTA software package used extensively by ESPs & ISPs to send and receive high volume commercial email. |
| POP3 | Post Office Protocol - a protocol for receiving email by downloading it to your computer from a mailbox on the server of an ISP or MBP. |
