Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

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…

"Spam's days are numbered, Gates says," according to the Miami Herald on January 24, 2004. Fellow anti-spam advocate Brian McNett is quick to point out that Gates' ideas won't work, and he's right about that. Read on for details. More >>

The new U.S. anti-spam law ("CAN-SPAM") is here to stay. It's a compromise law, that really won't make anybody happy on either side of the equation. People who send mail, even non-spammers, will find that it enacts some (fairly mild) restrictions on what they …

Different names for the same practice. Whether you call it closed-loop opt-in, confirmed opt-in, verified opt-in or double opt-in, you're generally referring to an email address verification process used to validate an email address before adding it to an electronic maili…

(Note: This is out of date. Click here for a much more up-to-date commentary from me about Spamcop.) Think long and hard about what spam filtering/blocking systems you utilize, especially if you have users that care about what mail they receive. I run a bunch of closed-loo…

THIS is a PDF of an judge's order regarding a lawsuit in the State of New York against a company named MonsterHut, alleging that they're spammers. It is dated Jan 6, 2003 (not 2002 as it incorrectly says in a couple places).

I was quoted in the August, 28th 2001 SpamCon Foundation newsletter, where I shared my experiences relating to spam complaints and ROI on purchased mailing lists. More >>

Michael Rathbun runs honet.com, and started noticing lots of attempts to deliver mail to an invalid email address there. Follow the travels of Nadine, as various companies share and spread this address around, with no apparent care for permission or verification. More >&g…

Check out this article on SFGate.com. It's an editorial by David Lazarus that talks about a local arts group being listed on Joe Jared's block list, for running an open relay. Here's a couple of snippets from it: A little digging revealed that OsiruSoft, based in …

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…

As you probably know, I used to be associated with the Mail Abuse Prevention System, the well-known anti-spam blacklist group. Though I continue to fully support a network owner's right to block email from whomever they please, I no longer have faith in MAPS' goals or…

I used to work for the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS). They maintain, among other things, the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL). The MAPS RBL is a list of Internet sites. On this list are sites that have sent spam, assisted people who sent spam, benefited from spam, or due t…