As the last few days of the year come to pass, I thought it might be fun to revisit the top five most viewed articles this year right here on Spam Resource.
"A New Zealand citizen living on the Sunshine Coast has been ordered by the Federal Court to pay a $210,000 fine for taking part in the world's largest spam operation. The fine comes after the 'spam king' has received fines from all over the world for his actio…
Today, I'm following up on my last post about how one must be able to have a way to tell the world about their super product and service. Jonathan writes, "I came across your web-site and I'd really appreciate some help regarding opt-in lists! I'm about to s…
Anonymous writes, "If someone can't use e-mail lists for marketing to potential customers how does one then share the message about a super product or service. I enjoy receiving information. If I do not wish to view the e-mail, then I simply delete. Please advise."…
I present to you a random email-related geek funny from 2002: "We're having a problem sending email out of the department." "What's the problem?" I asked. "We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained. I choke…
Yesterday, I pointed you at an anonymous blog , written by some angry random dude who happens to be really upset about Spamhaus. Anonymous ranty blogs are no fun; it's much more fun to mock the person behind them when you have a face go to along with the angry confusion. …
This hilarious anti-Spamhaus blog has decided that the best way to get the word out is by pirating content from other sites about how people who have been blacklisted for spamming are angry. Yes, it's true. People who have been blacklisted are angry. Shocking. Also, you …
The other day, somebody asked me what causes a recipient to receive the same message more than once. I run into duplicate message issues perhaps once or twice a year; not too often, but often enough that a recipient gets really angry at the sending ESP, assuming it's they&#…
The context: Over on Laura Atkins' Word to the Wise blog , she talks about the coming changes. The coming storm, if you will. How ISPs are fed up with sender practices. She rightly points out, that the rope ISPs currently give ESPs, is going to be used to hang a bad guy som…
A reader contacted me the other day, showing me an email message he had received from his bank. They had sent him a transactional message, and he took umbrage at the fact that the message did not have a way to unsubscribe from future messages. He contacted the bank, and the ba…
Good ISP info from Annalivia Ford, Christine Borgia, and Laura Atkins. Annalivia Ford: Why is my window fogged up? Annalivia talks about how ISPs actually tend to be less transparent in their spam filtering processes than in years past. Why? Because the edge case and bad guy…
Venkat Balasubramani has the story over on Eric Goldman's Technology & Marketing Law Blog (say that ten times fast).
Here's a good thing to read: Jamie Tomasello from Cloudmark reminding us of the basics. Permission matters. Co-reg is bad. Making assumptions in place of getting explicit permission. In her blog post , Jamie points out some very reasonable "don'ts": Having c…
Over on her fancy new blog, Annalivia Ford talks about the supposed "spam/anti-spam racket," like somehow ISPs want spam and find spam fighting to be a fabulous revenue stream (ROFL).
Spamhaus writes: "The Herbalking aftermath continues with a federal judge ordering ringleader Lance Atkinson to pay the FTC a hefty US$15 million. After already admitting his involvement to the New Zealand authorities last year now the US Federal Trade Commission steps in …
Alan Ralsky, a pump-and-dump spammer noted by Spamhaus as one of the world's top ten worst spammers for " quite some time ," is off to camp fed for 51 months. Anti-spammers are torn between cheering for his downfall and annoyance that the sentence doesn't incl…
Lynn asks, "Al, I'm hoping you can help me out. I belong to a group that has a mailing list of 350 people. Every month the group sends them a PDF, and there are always problems. Some people can't open the PDF attachment. Some people get the mail in their spam folde…
My friend Mickey Chandler mentioned to me that TAG44 emailed him yet again . They're apparently still putting a stupid "this is not spam" disclaimer in their email. As with last time, they reference a law that doesn't exist. "Note: We respect your Onli…
Yesterday, Loren McDonald blogged about "FISUE Syndrome." What is it? It's where a recipient "Forgot I Signed Up for Email." He writes: "Was That Email Spam? Or Just Spam-Like? Earlier this year, I received an email from a presentation company th…
Jerry writes, "Al, a recent email from 'Get to the Point' quoted you as below. My question is this: What, exactly , are spam [content] filters picking up from a generic template that could reduce delivery? Thanks in advance for your reply." It looks like I w…
Mangesh writes, "Can you verify and help me out to remove my exchange server at IP address XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX from blacklist.spambag.org? You can email me on same email address or alternate email address i.e. address@example.com . My contact number is XXX-XXX-XXX."
As Laura Atkins points out , everybody who uses the phrase "legitimate email marketer" seems to have some huge horrible problem caused by their own bad practices. And she's right. Actual legitimate marketers don't need to brag. They're too busy making mona…
Karmasphere, founded in 2005 by Meng Weng Wong as a reputation service provider, provided some neat tools, allowing any Joe internet user to publish their own blacklist or whitelist. Neat! How does one make money doing that? Sounds like they weren't too sure, either, based…
Vincent Hannah of Spamhaus reports : "Two New Zealanders well known to Spamhaus have been fined for their roles in the biggest pharmaceutical spamming operation in the history of the internet, officials of the nation's Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) said on Monda…
Perry writes, "I keep coming back to re-read your comments about AOL being the good guys. I must admit, that when our ISP is on their blacklist, bad things happen." Well, unless AOL has suddenly implemented a new policy of picking up a bus full of day laborers from …
In early 2007, Ed Falk , John Levine, and other trusted anti-spam and network security folks started to note that email addresses given only to TD Ameritrade were beginning to receive spam from unrelated entities.
Jeremy asks, "Al, Help! I submitted a support ticket to [an ISP] for my IPs which were getting tempfailed, and 24 hours later they were completely blocked! Why?"
Is your IP address on a blocklist? What does that mean and what should you do about it? First, here's what you need to know about blocklists (aka blacklists). There are more than 90 blocklists out there in the world, and fewer than a dozen of them are actively used as …
The spam subject lines? Little boy trapped in balloon; Boy-balloon-madness; balloon kid’s full story; Balloon boy died; Little boy trapped in balloon; Balloon boy died; balloon kid’s full story; Boy-balloon-madness; Drama with balloon(exclusive). I missed the balloon boy dra…
Riffing on two recent themes here at Spam Resource, on the topic of ISP abuse desk/ email staff ( now universally called Barry ), and how some people mistakenly expect unblock magic to happen even though their mail streams suck, an employee of an ISP's abuse desk wrote in,…
As you saw in my previous blog post , I've come out in support of opt-in being the legally mandated permission standard in Canada. I don't think it's all that big of a deal; as I said before, opt-in is already a best practice. In response to that, one of my Twitter …
There's an effort underway to undermine support for the Canadian anti-spam legislation currently in development. Why do people want to kill or gut Bill C-27? I'm having a hard time seeing a problem with an opt-in requirement; it's already best practice. People who d…
I must have landed in some scammer's address book, because I'm receiving some variant of this thing every day or two. Who is dumb enough to fall for this stuff? Besides the occasional Canadian, I mean. A scamming idiot writes: "My name is Steven Morgan and I work …
J.D. Falk expresses some legitimate concern about zombie blacklists over on the ReturnPath blog . Blackholes.us resurrected from the dead, and looking for delicious brains to snack on. Or something. The guy that ran blackholes.us seems to be long gone and the new owners of th…
Over on Spamtacular , Mickey Chandler answers the question, "Our last mailing had 30 complaints at AOL. Will signing with DKIM and SPF help with our reputation there?" As Mickey explains , it boils down to, no, not really, that's not what authentication does. In…
Box of Meat recently linked to a couple of bits of really good info from two different webmail providers, talking about how to stay safe and secure online. First, Michael Santerre from Google talks about how to pick a good password . Don't use the same password on multiple…
Let us pretend the situation is as follows. (I hope , for your sake, that the situation is not really as follows. If it is, your life probably sucks.) Your domain name is nonsense, a couple of words strung together. Your website has nothing on it, except bragging up how great…
Yesmail: "Need an email list to kick start your marketing program? See Yesmail Direct's awesome promo for 100 free in your zip" mihaisecasiu : "doesn't this go against every permission based marketing rule out there? some might even consider this as spam…
As my phone rings for the upteenth time this morning, I grumble to myself silently. It's good to be a popular guy, somebody whom a lot of folks want to call and ask questions of. But, it's a real time suck. Sometimes I feel like it keeps me from getting "real work&…
Back when my wife Kate and I had our wedding reception in June of 2009, we hired a local photographer, the sister of one of our friends. She worked out very well, and we were very happy with the results. The photographer partnered with a site called Pictage, to allow online pho…
From Slashdot: "Spamhaus [has] announced they are releasing a new list of IP addresses from which they've been receiving "snowshoe" spam — unsolicited email distributed across many IPs and domains in order to avoid triggering volume-based filters." The…
