Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

Here it is; the definitive page at Spam Resource, where I line up everything I have to share about list growth. The next person that asks me how to grow their list will be directed to this post. Part 1: How do I grow my list? -- December 1, 2010 Andrew Kordek of Trendline I…

Let's talk about Dan Balsam, lawyer turned anti-spam crusader . I've been glibly telling friends and colleagues that this guy is my hero, but Venkat Balasubramani rightly asks some important questions : Is he actually collecting on judgments? And what about his recent …

As the Detroit Free Press reported, a Michigan resident faces felony hacking charges for accessing his wife's email account sans her consent. Is this a case of a good deed gone wrong, or a line that never should have been crossed? I'm potentially on the fence, but over…

Marcel Lohmann, one of the admins behind the NiX Spam DNSBL , reached out to me to ask me if I would review this DNSBL. I haven't published any new blacklist reviews in a couple of years (and that's not likely to change any time soon), but I am happy to link to his Spam…

AOL hasn't yet mentioned this on their Postmaster Blog , but multiple sources are reporting that AOL's MX records temporarily vanished overnight. It's not clear how long the issue lasted, but based on the TTL (time to live) cache set for the AOL domain, the error pe…

As I have talked about before, backscatter is an annoying menace . Backscatter messages are sort of "ghost" bounces that come back to you, from sites that you've never sent mail to. It typically happens because a spammer is forging your email address or domain in …

Steve Linford of well-respected anti-spam group Spamhaus reports that Spamhaus is currently under DDoS attack by a pro-Wikileaks group. He has asked that the following information be shared relating to this ongoing attack. Steve writes: "In a statement released today on wi…

Engadget reports that "the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled [on Monday] that the government must have a search warrant before it can obtain email from your provider. Specifically, the court held in U.S. v Warshak that "it would defy common sense to afford emails l…

CAUCE Reports: "It’s been a long time coming, but Canada has an anti-spam law, and one, which sets a new world standard, and a tough, but fair, opt-in protocol for everyone in North America who sends commercial email and other electronic messages." FISA (Fighting Inte…

Spamhaus is warning that Wikileaks is redirecting web visitors to a mirror site hosted in "blackhat" network space that is currently listed on the Spamhaus SBL, and, as a result, the mirror site in question may not be safe to browse. Read all about it here .

Ken Magill reports that HolomaXx has dropped its suits against Return Path and Cisco IronPort. Read all about it here . ( Previously .)

Today, Return Path posted a short but very helpful set of guidelines that one should keep in mind when operating a DNSBL anti-spam blacklist . It's a must read.

Last week I shared a number of excellent list building tips from Andrew Kordek of Trendline Interactive . (Thanks again for that insight, Andrew!) Today, I'd like to share with you some more great suggestions on how to grow your list. Kelly Lorenz from Bronto Software …

Mark Brownlow over on Email Marketing Reports: In addition to expertly recapping the recent discussions surrounding permission versus relevance, opt-in versus opt-out, Mark adds his own succinct commentary to the mix: "The more you move away from the permission optimum (ex…

Sharon writes, "How do I build a list from scratch as a new company? Should I get someone to harvest them by hand so they are super targeted? Yes, I understand that spamming is unacceptable. Okay, so then how do I get a list or rather grow my own list?" My expertise i…

A friend asked me the other day, what exactly is bulletproof hosting? Laura Atkins has complained before, on this very blog , that Google is a bulletproof hosting provider. Google doesn't exactly fit the criteria, but Laura's frustration was legitimate; stemming from Go…

Peter Seebach reports on spam he received from Netprospex , and how their lists might not be as "verified" as claimed. (Also note my previous post on bad advice from Netprospex , and feedback and opinions from others .)

My old friend Mike Horwath previously shared with us his experience with Newegg sending him spam. Now he's letting us know that one of his employees is also receiving spam from Newegg. I'm bummed; Newegg always seemed to be a great place to buy computers and electroni…

I had another thought today about Gretchen Scheiman's recent MediaPost article . (You can read my thoughts from yesterday here .) In Mickey Chandler's follow-up post , Gretchen commented and was careful to clarify that her position of "my inbox is open, come and g…

Gretchen Scheiman of OgilvyOne wrote a piece for MediaPost the other day, entitled, " Does Permission Need To Be Explicit? " It's an interesting read and she is most certainly entitled to her opinion. I'm not really going to debate the point with her; other re…

I never noticed this until now, but my friend Jess Henig wrote an article for FactCheck.org all the way back in 2008, talking about how forwarded emails filled with lies and balogna keep resurfacing . Crazy stuff, yet people keep forwarding it to each other. Obama is supposedly…

In addition to my own post mentioning the lawsuit , a number of other wise folks have commented on the Holomax lawsuit(s) against Microsoft and friends. None of whom seem to think Holomaxx has much of a chance of winning when going up against the ISPs. Ken Magill: A HolomaXx W…

Laura Atkins beat me to it, writing about this new MarketingSherpa case study wherein a company decimated their list and actually grew revenue. Go read her taken on it over at the Word to the Wise blog .

From TechEye.net: [Email sender Holomaxx is alleging that] “Microsoft knowingly relies on faulty automated filters and equally faulty third party information to identify purported spam emails,” said the suit. “Even after Holomaxx informed Microsoft that it was not sending spam …

Here are quick links to all four posts in my past three part series (uh, what?) on CAN-SPAM Myths. CAN-SPAM Myth #1: Applies Only to Spam CAN-SPAM Myth #2: This Law Makes it OK to Spam CAN-SPAM Myth #3: Password Protecting the Unsub Page is OK CAN-SPAM Myth #4: Doesn't Appl…

Chad White, Research Director for Smith-Harmon, published a great post yesterday on why image rendering is important for CAN-SPAM compliance . In it, he highlights an example email, where some sort of rendering issue results in the unsubscribe links and sender information to be…

I just posted information on changes to DNSWL.org over on DNSBL Resource . Looks like they're moving to a for-pay model, for at least large volume queries. Can't say that I blame them; if it is costing them money to keep their project alive, at some point it seems inevi…

The outbound mail servers used by Godaddy hosting customers appear to be blocklisted by the Abusive Hosts Blocking List (AHBL). Over in this Godaddy Community Forums thread , a Godaddy representative named ChrisG seems to be implying to complaining clients that AHBL is unrelia…

What does Scott Adams think? Selling customer data like email addresses to third parties is like selling expired, rotting milk to a foreign country that has no laws against that sort of thing. It may be totally legal, but you're setting up the buyer for a future failure. …

If you ask me, payday loans are a permission challenged industry, when it comes to email marketing. Companies are buying leads, selling leads, working with multiple data partners, emailing at a high frequency, always pushing to get more mail out, find new signup streams, etc. …

A reader wrote in with the following question/complaint about Senderbase.org . I'm going to post this one anonymously. The reader wrote, "I would like to request a review of senderbase.org. I would like to know if I am the only one that has communication problems with …

Ken Magill has questions about my prior post. And yes, you do have to move to Holland.

Venkat Balasubramani recaps the history of serial spam plaintiff Asis Internet over on his great Spam Notes blog. Nicely ties everything together.

Ken Magill, over on The Magill Report, had this to say about link blog Box of Meat : "I get a lot of story ideas from Box of Meat. It is No. 1 on my “favorites” list. It is the first blog I check every day because it always leads me in new, informative, unexpected directi…

In light of the various ESP-related data breaches we've seen, exposing various email lists to spammers and the world over the past couple of years, it seems this is something the email service industry ought to be keeping an eye on. A friend tipped me that Bill HR2221, the…

If you've ever received a spam email that had a bunch of random text at the bottom, text that didn't make sense or didn't relate to the rest of the email, you've seen hashbusting in action. Hashbusting is a spammer trick wherein they take blobs of text and app…

SOPHOS.COM.FELL.FOR.A.VERY.OLD.HACK.TODAY. I guess if you haven't been around for a while, you've never noticed that there are instances in WHOIS where you might look up a domain result and get a wacky hostname result back, too, because somebody on the internet though…

The current owner of SPAM-L , a long-time anti-spam discussion mailing list, announced on September 3rd that long-time subscriber Rich Kulawiec 's ability to participate in the list has been terminated. This appeared to be in response to Rich's caustic and threatening …

ARF (Abuse Reporting Format), a simple specification that enables senders of email abuse reports (like, spam complaints and feedback loop reports, for example) to easily and appropriately encapsulate those reports in a way that ensures the receiving site will have all the infor…

Here's Ken Magill's take  on Co-RegData.com theft of my blog content. (xx301yz89901112aaaah33q3q3qbw)

My old friend Mike Horwath relates his tale of Newegg.com doing just about everything wrong in response to a spam complaint. Spamming him again after he contacted you, then holding up the phrase "you've been removed" as if it means you've really resolved the …

Co-regdata.com seem to be pirating content from my own site here at Spam Resource dot com. Example stolen content: http://www.co-regdata.com/2010/08/27/ken-magill-returns-45th-edition/ That seems to be a duplicate copy of my post about Ken Magill's new website. Oddly, t…

Today's post is from Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise . She relates a frustration that I personally share: Google's seeming lack of caring about abuse emanating from their own networks and services. She writes: Are you a spammer or a potential spammer? Do you want bul…

I asked fellow blogger (and email expert) John Levine the following: "The Supreme Court overturned the Jaynes conviction on First Amendment grounds, yes? I'm wondering what that could mean from the spam filtering perspective." Find his very detailed answer here .

I've been talking to folks a lot these past couple of days about the potential legalities around blocking unwanted spam from non-profit, political or advocacy senders. From what I understand, this is pretty likely to be legal. The first amendment limits government action as…

Yesterday on Twitter, somebody asked about how DNSBLs are restricted by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution . Apparently there's some advocacy group somewhere who is upset that they're listed on a blacklist, and they seem to be investigating potential …

Yeah, you could do everything Sallie Severns recommends, or you could do this instead: Don't buy lists . There's a simple reason why: Buying lists and getting solid inbox delivery are entirely incompatible. Period. End of story. (And a tip of the hat to John Caldwell…