Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

In case you needed more fuel for the fire regarding why staying off of Spamhaus's blacklist matters, check this out: Yahoo is now indicating that they will refuse email messages from IP addresses on the Spamhaus SBL , XBL , or PBL blacklists. This is just another in a lon…

Over on Email Insider, Loren McDonald talks about the convergence of best practice recommendations and ISP guidelines for senders. Loren correctly highlights that CAN-SPAM isn't enough. You need real permission and real adherence to best practices. A must read!

Today I got spam from something called "Bloglines" from IP address 65.214.39.152:

Check out this blog post from Wired editor Chris Anderson . Chris talks about lazy PR flacks sending him misdirected and unwanted press releases and other junk. He names names, too, posting a long list of folks he's never going to accept mail from ever again. One of those…

It'd take too long to get into the whole story, so here's the short version: Anti-spam activist David Ritz is being sued by a guy named Jerry Reynolds , apparently for, uh, performing DNS and WHOIS lookups. You know, asking public servers for public information that t…

I'm not even sure why this is garnering press coverage . But, that's not going to stop me from jumping on the bandwagon. The short version is: Gail Mortenson, a freelance writer from Washington DC, lost her AOL account, which she had been using for business. So, her r…

I ran across this interesting press release the other day. It's from McAfee, talking about how their Secure Internet Gateway appliance compares to a similarly-positioned device from Barracuda. When comparing the two devices for spam filtering over a two week period, the …

Back in March, Mark Brownlow posted some good info on his Email Marketing Reports site about list rentals, list purchasing, and co-registration. Is list purchasing a good idea? "With very, very few exceptions, purchasing a bulk list like this is a shortcut to email mark…

As I said to Ken Magill for his recent article regarding Truthout : From what I know of how spam blocking works, and how ISPs make the determination regarding what mail to block, I don't think Truthout's issues (being blocked at Hotmail and AOL) relate to their politics…

I'm now utilizing “ second stage ” filtering, using the primary Spamhaus blacklist, the SBL . For me, it's an experiment. I just wanted to see how well it works and what kind of mail it catches. I know that a large number of email addresses are now behind this kind of f…

MailChimp is looking for a few good....monkeys. Ha.

Another political group is complaining about the big meanies at AOL and Hotmail not accepting their mail. This is nothing new , but I'll mention yet again what I mentioned then: Delivering mail to Hotmail and AOL is hard only when you don't know what you're doing…

You can catch anti-spam professional (and Internet for Dummies author) John Levine on TV tomorrow. He writes: Last year I helped some Canadian film makers do a TV show called "Spam, the Documentary". Now US viewers can see it on Court TV tomorrow Sept 18th at 11pm…

In "Will the Real Spam Please Stand Up?," Kevin Stirtz disagrees with the statement , "until a user has opted-in to your email list, you are sending spam." All fine and good. Nothing wrong with a bit of disagreement. I'll prove it: I disagree! Do a…

Look, it happens to everyone. Run a large network some time. Put a Windows box, or two, or a thousand, on it. Eventually somebody will find a way to bypass the Anti-Virus, and there'll be an infection. I've had to call a big company here or there, having traced a spam…

From noted anti-spam professional and "Internet for Dummies" author John Levine: By my reading this is as close to a complete victory as Spamhaus could have hoped for. There was no chance the appeals court would throw out the default, since that would have been an i…

Hot off the press, courtesy of the excellent legal document site SpamSuite.com . Mickey Chandler breaks it down: The default judgment stays (e360: 1, Spamhaus 0) The money judgment is overturned (e360: 1, Spamhaus: 11,715,000) The injunction is overturned (e360: 1, Spamhaus: …

I see a very strange thing today (August 30th). APEWS, an "anonymous" anti-spam blacklist (whose listing policies are very broad and of questionable accuracy ) has taken down their home page. When you go to www.apews.org , what you find today is a memorial message. …

I hate blowback . Or call it backscatter , or outscatter , if you prefer. Either way, it's no fun. If your mail server sends it, you're contributing to a growing problem. I don't know what's worse: All the blocked messages from the poorly designed Barracuda…

If this isn't proof that it can happen to anyone, I don't know what is: Apparently MAPS has a compromised computer, found to be sending spam, and that IP address is now blacklisted. A recent post to the SPAM-L discussion list tipped me off. Someone there noted hits i…

Lots of talk about the "anonymous" APEWS blacklist lately. Over on DNSBL Resource, I summarize everything I've seen on the topic , and include some info regarding its effectiveness as an anti-spam filter against my own spamtrap and hamtrap. Additionally, I'v…

Internet email and security guru John Levine sums it up a lot better than I ever could, so I'll simply point you in his general direction . Update: John Levine pulled his post down, replacing it with this text: "This post has been withdrawn due to objections from Vir…

Richi Jennings breaks it down: Peter Brockman, and open questions on C/R success rate determination methodology. As Richi puts it, "Statistics aside, asking C/R users if they're happy isn't the be-all and end-all of anti-spam research. C/R users may indeed be ha…

My friend Neil Schwartzman asked me a question during the FTC Spam Summit a couple of weeks ago. He asked me, “Where's the consumer?” Neil, executive director of CAUCE (the Coalition for Unsolicited Commercial Email) in North America, had a point . The whole point of thi…

Infacta's "Messaging Times" posted a generally good article today on what you should be doing to minimize blocklistings. Except... The article posits that "blacklist agents" should "contact senders that were reported prior to listing them with a…

Gerald writes, " Help! I need to call the spam police and I don't know where to turn. My email address has been used to SEND spam. I know this only because an email sent under my name was undeliverable, and so the 'undeliverable' email report was sent to me. Th…

Hi from DC. I'm taking a break from the FTC Spam Summit 2007 to swap laptop batteries and check email. Just as I got back to my hotel room, I got a page from a monitoring script I had set up. One of my spamtrap mailboxes was almost full and needed housecleaning. I logged …

It would seem that this SBL listing means that if you have a blog at http://(something).blogspot.com, your mail is going to be blocked by any site that checks the IP addresses of URLs found in messages, to see if those IP addresses are blacklisted. Read more about it here . …

The TQMCUBE Blocklist seems to have been abandoned, and/or the creator and admins are missing in action. Over on DNSBL.com, I've collected all the information I have on the topic.

Down in the trenches, as it were, I see a lot of miscommunication and misdirection on the subject of confirmed opt-in/double opt-in. Here's some quick notes, thoughts spurred by recent discussion on various forums I participate in. Confirmed opt-in and double opt-in both …

I sign up for hundreds upon hundreds of lists. I maintain multiple "hamtraps," collections of received mail that I actually asked for. So it's not spam, but sometimes the line gets a little blurred. Take, for example, a random veterans affairs site. In April I s…

This has been making the rounds in the blogosphere these past few days: Vonage is taking months/years old addresses, submitted ONLY for a forward-to-a-friend promotion, and sending advertising to those people years later . If true, it violates all best practice guidelines for…

I spoke at both INBOX and Internet Retailer recently, and at both events heard smart marketers ask, "Why do readers unsubscribe, ignore or complain about my emails? They opted-in!" -- Stephanie Miller from Return Path . Worth reading. I'd like to extend Stepha…

More on why email address harvesting sucks from BtoB Magazine by way of Email Marketing Reports .

Q: How long does it take a new Gmail account to get spam? A: In my case, one day. May 26: Create account. Address has never been given out to anyone. May 27: Receive weird spam in Chinese. Q: How long does it take for an address, published on the web, to be harvested? A:…

Greetings from the San Jose airport, where I am waiting to fly home after attending the INBOX Event. I was there to participate in a panel on deliverability and authentication, along with my good friend Morgan Witt from BlueHornet. The highlight for me was Patrick Peterson fr…

I'm at a conference, so I don't have much time to blog about it, but helpful folks keep forwarding me this over and over, convinced that I need to be told. So, for the record, I am aware that Soloway was arrested . More on the topic from Forbes , CNet , and Yahoo . I re…

It's time for me to go back to the drawing board for a new opinion on Spamcop's SCBL blacklist. In the past, I had consistently observed significant false positive issues, but no more -- any false positive issues seem to have been resolved. For more on the topic, incl…

I loved this post , and here's what I loved about it: [The prospect who got himself blacklisted] thought he could solve all his problems if he switched to MailChimp, because we apparently have a good reputation, and because he thought we had some kind of secret-handshake a…

Mark Mumma, if you weren't aware, is the anti-spammer who sued Omega World Travel a/k/a cruise.com over spam allegations, and lost. It seems to me that this may have been a situation where hubris and anger took control, getting in the way of facts and logic. After all, t…

If there’s one thing I wish somebody would have warned me about a few months ago, it’s this: Get proactive with Sender ID, and do it NOW! Sender ID suddenly just became a big deal at Hotmail. If you don’t have a Sender ID record, or you don’t have it exactly right, get a move…