Showing posts with the label idiocy

Spam Complaints Matter

When you're fighting spam, you reach out to a lot of different people. If you received spam and you're savvy enough, you send it to the ISP from whence it originated, and ask them to take action to make the spam stop. If you work for an ESP or a blacklist group, you might reach out to the sender and ask them to prove that this person opted-in, with details, in order to resolve the &q…
Read more

Guest Post: Huey Callison: Reader Feedback Week

A spammer was kind enough to leave me a voicemail message today. I wanted to share it with you, so you could understand the delightful insight I receive from listening to differing viewpoints. Alas, I'm traveling for work, so I didn't really have a lot of time to respon…

When Terminology Attacks

I was reading a mailing list today, as I often do. Some random guy, nobody I know, he posted a request for help. He said, more or less: "Hey, blacklist XYZ has listed my double opt-in server. What should I do?" Approximately 13 seconds after posting, he was verbally…

Promoting Transparency

I just received an email. It was sent an email list that I signed up for, in person, last week, at a wine tasting in my neighborhood here in Chicago. It was very much a desired email. I can't wait to go back to that wine store (once I'm over this cold) and stock up. I d…

Mourning the Loss of DearAOL.com

Wow, how time flies. It's been more than a year since DearAOL.com fell off the face of the internet. Remember what that was? It was an astroturf site (i.e. a fake grass roots community movement) trying to strike fear in the hearts of us mere mortals about how the end of …

More bites at the apple?

This is bizarre. If you're a registered, opted-in user of Peachtree, and you unsubscribe from their emails, you could end up receiving this : Our records indicate that [redacted] may have been inadvertantly [sic] opted out of e-mail communications. If you did request to …

Forced Opt-in

Forcing somebody to opt-in, by making them check a box that says, "I agree to X" before you'll let them buy from you (or even register) is a bad idea. It's just plain lame. I've run into this a lot over the years -- and I am well aware of what happens. Whe…

Las Vegas Spam via China

I get a new one of these every couple of weeks. The from addresses and names vary; usually it has a random Gmail address on the from address. The name associated is something like "Nathan Singer" or "Jeff Strum" and seems to vary with each mailing. The CAN-…

North Dakota Judge Gets it Wrong

....WAY wrong. This is just mind blowing. Ever been prosecuted for tracking spam? Running a traceroute? Doing a zone transfer? Asking a public internet server for public information that it is configured to provide upon demand? No? Well, David Ritz has. And amazingly, he …

Oh, please.

Another political group is complaining about the big meanies at AOL and Hotmail not accepting their mail. This is nothing new , but I'll mention yet again what I mentioned then: Delivering mail to Hotmail and AOL is hard only when you don't know what you're doing…

Nick Renton

On July 31, 2001, Nick Renton , of Melbourne, Australia, wrote an interesting commentary on why a new anti-spam blacklist, called ORBL, was a bad thing. Oddly enough, the only reason I knew about this, is because Mr. Renton actually chose to advertise this fact to me -- by e…