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. T…
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 acr…
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 r…
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?" …
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 …
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 spammi…
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 oft…
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 r…
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 t…
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 trans…
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 per…
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 revenu…
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 hi…
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-…
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 p…
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 emai…
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 E…
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 gen…
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…
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 s…
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 white…
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 histo…
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." W…
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 re…
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 m…
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 k…
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 ma…
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 …
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…
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 t…
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 sna…
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?" …
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 Santer…
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 nonsen…
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 th…
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…
Back when my wife Kate and I had our wedding reception in June, we hired a local photographer, the sister of one of our friends. She worked out very well, and we were very happy …
From Slashdot: "Spamhaus [has] announced they are releasing a new list of IP addresses from which they've been receiving "snowshoe" spam — unsolicited email di…
