spam resource: April 2016

Google Postmaster Tools: Not receiving data?

A few different folks have reported to me that when accessing Google Postmaster Tools, they were seeing this message being displayed instead of data:

No data to display at this time. Please come back later. Postmaster Tools requires that your domain satisfies certain criteria before data is available for this chart. Refer to the help page for more information.

B2B Spam is Dumb and You're Dumb and This Other Guy is Dumb, too

Every so often somebody approaches me to ask me if B2B spam is OK now, because they get B2B spam at their work address. Everybody gets it, they presume, thus it must now be acceptable. Or it was always acceptable and those deliverability guys were just trying to mislead them before.

Microsoft Outlook.com / Hotmail Deliverability Troubleshooting

You can find the updated guide here.

I'm blocking all mail from .top

I'm blocking all mail from the new .top TLD, because I'm getting absolutely pummeled with spam from a spammer or small group of spammers rotating through .top domains, trying to hide who they really are. You might want to avoid the .top TLD for email purposes right now; since the only samples I can see are bad things, you won't be in very good company.

UnsubCentral: Anybody home?

I emailed your support address five days ago and haven't heard back. Are you out there? Please get back to me. Thanks!

Gmail: Top 5 Deliverability Do's and Don'ts

You can find an updated version here.

Best Email Frequency?

How often should you email your subscribers? Every 37 minutes.

Just kidding.

(A very old CBL logo.)

Click on over to ArsTechnica if you want to learn more about the specifics of this particular spamming botnet army. The interesting bit (for me, anyway) is that the infected machines monitored the Spamhaus CBL blacklist and would request removal if found to be listed. That's pretty amazing; does this count as the machines being alive? Joking aside, I wonder how one catches and notes these robotic blacklist removal requests.

Spamhaus to indicate DROP status via DNS

In addition to the blacklists we all know and respect, Spamhaus maintains two other special lists: The DROP (Don't Route Or Peer) and EDROP (Extended Don't Route Or Peer) lists.

Outlook.com Inbound Email Issues

It looks like Hotmail done gone and blowed up again.

I am seeing multiple reports that mail server connection attempts to hotmail.com / outlook.com recipients are either timing out or resulting in mail to legitimate users is being rejected with a "554 Transaction Failed" error. This appears to be affecting at least one large email service provider, and probably others.

For some folks, it has been happening since before noon central time on Wednesday. I personally just started to see it on my own mail server around 5:00 pm on Wednesday. As of this writing (6:30 pm), it's still happening.

This is what makes it tricky for an ESP's bounce handling. You can't just assume that any old hard bounce means that a recipient must be invalid, when an ISP could (and occasionally does) fall down, go boom.

Update: This issue seems to have been resolved sometime after 7:00 pm central time on Wednesday, April 6th.