Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

John's a famous guy. A self-described "entrepreneur and civil libertarian," he's probably most recently famous for being the guy who challenged the government over requirements that you produce ID before you are allowed on an airplane : "In 2002, Gilmore …

Q: Is challenge/response a well respected spam prevention/spam blocking methodology? A: NO . Heh.

RFC Ignorant (RFCI) is a blacklist. It lists sites that don't have working postmaster or abuse addresses, among a few other reasons. The name "RFC Ignorant" comes from the belief that not having these addresses working on your system means that you're out of s…

Cindy from NY writes: "Hello -- I am receiving abusive e-mails and am trying to track them through Sam Spade et.al. I think I know who is sending them and am trying to match IP addresses with old legitimate e-mails from the sender. Is this possible? I've spent many hou…

Bill from the UK writes: "I'm 66 and not a tech guy. I've just been kicked back as a "KNOWN SOURCE OF SPAM (NJABL)" although I don't generate spam. I do occasionally send large files to business associates, and some get kicked back because of size, bu…

Over here , I help answer a question about Challenge/Response filters, in MediaPost's EmailInsider newsletter. I was already a reader before the "E-mail Diva" reached out to me. It's worth signing up for.

Here's an update from Groklaw on the lawsuit brought against Spamhaus by e360. Good reading, good insight. As always, the comments from the peanut gallery contain a lot of armchair lawyering, much of it suspect.

I received the question yet again today: Who's been sued under CAN-SPAM? Let's take a look and see what our good friend, the Internet, has to say on the subject. Just last month, Earthlink won an $11 million judgement against a Nevada-based Internet marketing company …

John from the UK writes: We have recently -- the last 2 weeks -- become victims of a spamming outfit. They have borrowed our domain name and are sending out emails from random fictitious addresses within the domain. We know about it because of the bounce back messages from corp…

In March 2005, I was helping a top-tier ISP with an issue related to a sender utilizing co-registration. The sender wasn't a client of my (then) employer, but the ISP had asked me to assist them with an issue. When you signed up on this sender's site, if you opted-in, y…

On Friday, NetworkWorld talked about Google's new "Code Search" tool : "The company's new source-code search engine, unveiled Thursday as a tool to help simplify life for developers, can also be misused to search for software bugs, password information …

Be careful about giving your information out for sweepstakes. I signed up for some sweepstakes hosted by Peel.com on May 6, 2003. Like I always do, I gave them a tagged (unique) address, so I could tell how my address was used (or misused) later. Flash forward a few years. I…

Here's a lawyer's take on the $11.7 million lawsuit and summary judgement against the UK anti-spam group Spamhaus.

I was pleased to discover today that even the Chicago Police Department utilizes double opt-in for their newsletters signup . I wonder what led them to implement their signup form in this fashion? I've dropped them a line asking for more info, we'll see if they respond.…

It seems pretty basic, but I often get asked how to attach a file to an email campaign. Maybe it's just going to a handful of folks, but you don't always want the hassle of sending it to each person individually from Outlook. The problem is, you'll find that most em…

Today I got mail from "Angela Brobst," with a subject line of "question about your site." She apparently works for "The Search Doctors," located in Aliso Viejo, CA. "I can put your site at the top of a search engines listing. This is no joke …

Over on MediaPost's EmailInsider, Paul Beck talks about his experiences at an email marketing conference in Holland. One thing that hit home for me was Paul's comment that lots of e-mail related issues are new to the Dutch. My experience isn't with Holland, but it…

Here's a link to a document I wrote back in February, 2006 . It gives an overview of how to implement double opt-in. How does it work? What do you need to be careful about? How do you track opt-ins? How do you handle replies? Etc. Multiple anti-spam groups and ISPs have c…

Since SPF records are DNS TXT records, they can only contain up to 255 characters of information. In some situations, you might not be able to fit all your sending networks in a small, 255-character text string. So, what do you do? Easy! Just use SPF's "include&qu…

I've finally transitioned spamresource.com from its old home on my DSL connection in Minneapolis. It's now hosted on Blogger, which seems like a quick and easy platform for me to post various articles and links as I run across them. For most of the time during the lo…

Note: This is a guide I wrote back in 2005/2006 to share with folks how to properly implement confirmed opt-in aka double opt-in. I'm sharing a copy of it here to protect it against digital bit rot. -- Al Iverson Double Opt-in How-To: Implementation Suggestions from BlueHo…