Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

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?"

The Canadian anti-spam bill everyone is talking about, bill C-27, passed an important milestone on Monday October 26, at 17:30 when it passed clause-by-clause committee review and was referred back to the Canadian House of Commons materially intact and without controversial ame…

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…