Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

" Is there anything wrong with collecting business cards and selling the list? " -- Ian Cooper, president of new business development for EmailAppenders. Yes, Ian, there's something wrong with everything you do. You enable people to send spam. Not exactly somethin…

If you're mad about how something is run at your school, is it OK to spam 391 people complaining about it? If the school is Michigan State, the answer is no . (And it's an answer I agree with.)

Zoominfo -- a company that has created some sort of business contact database where you (you probably being "spammer") can buy lists of email addresses. Ken Magill talks about them here , quoting deliverability consultant Laura Atkins at length . Here's my take …

John Levine reports on yet another example of spam received from the servers of spam filtering service provider Postini.

Word on the street is, if you're running an MTA that utilizes pipelining aggressively, you're probably having trouble sending email to Gmail right now. Here's an example of the error message received when messages are being deferred: (host aspmx.l.google.com[72.14…

Quick Link: Looks like Backscatter , the annoyance of bounces you receive in response to something somebody else sent (usually spam), has finally made its way into the public eye. USA Today Reports: 'Backscatter spam' gums up many e-mail inboxes .

Over here, email marketer Dylan Boyd talks about the the DMA's "launch" of an email opt-out site. What, you mean, eMPS? That thing that has been around since at least 2005 ? Actually, since 2000 . This is just the same old thing in a shiny new wrapper. Not onl…

From the NY Times: The Federal Trade Commission won a preliminary legal victory against what it called one of the largest spam gangs on the Internet, getting an Illinois district court on Tuesday to freeze the group's assets and order the spam network to shut down. The g…

____ sent me an email today. ____ "would like feedback on my recent order." My recent order. The one I placed....in February. At first I thought it was spam. I didn't recall ordering anything from this company. I almost reported it as spam, until I decided to …

A few weeks ago, I got spam from some wine store I had never heard of: Randolph Wine Cellars. Located in Chicago, it looks like a neat place, from their website. Except for one problem: They seem to be spammers. There's a twist to this story, and in fact, it's what hel…

Over on DNSBL Resource, I posted a quick rant and link to the DNSBL best practice draft document . This BCP ought to be required reading for any current or future blacklist operator.

Are you looking to buy a list? There’s no faster path to being identified as a spammer. If you’re looking to damage your ability to send mail, or if you’re looking to damage your online reputation, then this might be for you. Check out The Data Supplier . One billion email add…

Celso writes, "Can you please help me verify that my IP addresses are not on any blocklist?" No, I cannot, Celso. And here's why: It doesn't matter. You're going to be on somebody's blocklist somewhere. The IP address you use, the domain you use, the…

Hey, there’s been a lot of news floating around out there about how we’re all doomed to suffer from more spam because the conviction of Jeremy Jaynes (aka Gaven Stubberfield) for sending illegal spam was recently overturned . What it boils down to is this: This applies to the V…

My favorite email/spam-related blog, Box of Meat , points us toward SpamBLR , a site that takes spam subject lines and uses them for inspiration for funny and strange photo-montages and drawings. Give Her Big Meat , a fairly typical (and drab) spam subject line, is handled in a…

Read all about it: Translation: Though Davidson's end was shocking, that a spammer would resort to violence was not. There are a lot of Eddie Davidsons out there, and Linford and other Spamhaus volunteers deal with them every day — and not without risk. [...] Spammers [.…

Ken Magill (or shall I say, Mr. Poopyhead) makes a funny, yet very insightful point, in his recent article about an email he recently received from the Obama campaign. His article is fun, and silly, and it accurately highlights what can go wrong when you don’t confirm or verif…

According to Justin Mason, domain registrar (and email/web hoster) Godaddy is misusing the Spamhaus PBL: Using it as a URL filter. This is where you convert a URL hostname to its IP address, then look up that IP address (or its nameserver) on an IP-based blacklist. Great idea. …

Hey, what? Did I really just read that? An email appender sending out a press release about how to combat spam? Wait...the company name sounds familiar. Is it the company Ken Magill talks about here ? Ha. Methinks somebody is trying to spread some fluff around in an effort…

Somebody just asked me what I mean when I say "sender." I often refer to senders in contexts like this: A good sender should always do X. Somebody who does Y will always be labeled as a bad sender. In my mind, a sender is simply somebody who sends email. Someone who …

Dylan at email service provider eROI points out that Pizza Hut's email sign up process is substandard : You have to opt-in to receive emails just to order a pizza online. This is seemingly another sign of people who have ... interesting ... ideas about email best practice…

The Consumerist headline says it all: Pizza Hut Sends Unsolicited Email To Apologize For Sending Unsolicited Email Or does it? Let's talk it through. Look, I can see something bad happening accidentally. For as many email platforms I've worked with, there are just as…

ReturnPath has purchased Habeas, according to all of the industry sources in the world, all of whom have sent me separate emails giving me a heads up about the acquisition. Let the goofy haikus commence ! My favorite : It took Habeas Millions to figure out that Haikus d…

Ever wondered what the sending reputation was for your favorite presidential candidate? Here's the IP addresses and Sender Score ranking for the last three mailings I've received from each of them. The Sender Score number was noted at the time I originally received th…

Terry Zink reports on the most recent ball of spam that he (and most of us) have been receiving: Fake news alerts that claim to be from CNN .

Mark Brownlow talks about Yahoo's take on subscriber engagement here . After you read that, check out Mark's more generalized theory on what ISPs consider when determining whether or not email is unwanted . Comments from Yahoo's Mark Risher confirm what many of us …

Hey, fellow anti-spammers: "Re-Engagement Strategy" is what email service providers or deliverability people would call a reconfirmation email or a permission pass . DJ Waldow has a good write up over on Bronto Blog of a recent re-engagement email he received from S…

Ken says what I'm thinking , as is often the case. Spam bad? Yup. Davidson a scumbag? Yup. Happy about a murder suicide? Nope. Happy about just the suicide? Nope, never. All I can say is, if you can crack jokes about this guy killing himself and/or others, then you've…

Here's a tale from Matt Blumberg , CEO of ReturnPath, on how confirmed opt-in, aka double opt-in, isn't necessarily enough to 100% prevent spam complaints. Why? Because there's no fool proof guard against stupid. The stupid, in this case, comes from the recipient. T…

Backscatter has long annoyed me . But, I've been even more annoyed at the lack of comprehensive information online explaining exactly what backscatter is, and why it sucks. Without material to reference, it's hard to explain the problem to others. Thankfully, this is st…

I was reading a mailing list today, as I often do. Some random guy, nobody I know, he posted a request for help. He said, more or less: "Hey, blacklist XYZ has listed my double opt-in server. What should I do?" Approximately 13 seconds after posting, he was verbally…

Ed Falk on E360 dropping lawsuits with prejudice (meaning E360 cannot refile). Mickey points out that E360 reached a settlement agreement with Mark Ferguson but not with the others. I wonder what that means. Is Mark on the hook for something, and perhaps he should have just …

Mickey Chandler asks, " Do you want to fund the lawsuit? " Meaning, if you're splitting the hair very thin to make the case that what you're doing *must* be legally compliant, ask yourself: Do you really want to be that edge case that gets pulled into court? I…

Terry Zink blogs about the necessity of a "Report Moron" button . Ha.

Dylan from email service provider eROI talks about how he got an offer to sign up for services from a competing email service provider. And, as Dylan puts it, "they are using my emailROI email address that I stopped using over 4 years ago. And this sender is something th…

Check out this very old presentation about the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) , from October, 2000. I had already left MAPS at that point, but apparently, my personal brand was strong enough to leave my name in the presentation, as it indicates that RSS was created by me. …

Insight on the topic (and thoughts on industry leadership issues) from Ken Magill and Laura Atkins .

Ben at MailChimp takes us through it : Postini causes wanted mail to not be delivered. MailChimp tries to work with Postini. Postini rather lamely says, "Yeah, they're known spammers." MailChimp pushes hard enough and long enough that Postini actually looks into i…

Remember James Gordon? The guy who sued Virtumundo, and lost? If you don't remember, here's some history: Ken Magill laughs at Gordon here . Mickey Chandler talks about it here . Ed Falk talks about how Gordon lost so badly that Virtumundo was awarded legal fees .

Might I recommend you check out J.D. Falk's " Box of Meat " blog? It has rapidly become one of my favorites, the blog I check first when it's time to start reading my way around the blog-o-sphere. Quick links (and insightful one liners) take you straight to th…

Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise covers the topic capably , covering both sides of the ISP/blacklist filtering coin. Here’s my take on it, based on my experiences working both as a blacklist operator, and consultant working with senders on how to improve delivery by doing the r…

It's time for a friendly reminder: It's not cool to steal content from somebody else's blog to put on your own. If you're quoting 98% of somebody else's blog post on your own blog, you're pirating their content. A quick excerpt and a link? Those are aw…

"You gotta fight! For your right! To connnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnntact!" -- Beastie Boys (sort of) Regarding the ongoing saga of E360 versus the Entire Universe, it looks like E360 has put out a press release explaining that they plan to soldier on. The subheading …

E360 (who is also fighting Spamhaus in court) just saw their lawsuit against Comcast laughed out of court. The judge in this case really seems to be savvy on the issues involved. Third sentence in: "Some, perhaps even a majority of people in this country, would call [E…

Over on her blog, Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise shares eleven timely tips on dealing with ISPs when you're blocked. A lot of it is common sense, but then again ... I know that a lot of people need common sense training.

I just received an email. It was sent an email list that I signed up for, in person, last week, at a wine tasting in my neighborhood here in Chicago. It was very much a desired email. I can't wait to go back to that wine store (once I'm over this cold) and stock up. I d…

Wow, how time flies. It's been more than a year since DearAOL.com fell off the face of the internet. Remember what that was? It was an astroturf site (i.e. a fake grass roots community movement) trying to strike fear in the hearts of us mere mortals about how the end of …