Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

Check out this blog post from Wired editor Chris Anderson . Chris talks about lazy PR flacks sending him misdirected and unwanted press releases and other junk. He names names, too, posting a long list of folks he's never going to accept mail from ever again. One of those…

It'd take too long to get into the whole story, so here's the short version: Anti-spam activist David Ritz is being sued by a guy named Jerry Reynolds , apparently for, uh, performing DNS and WHOIS lookups. You know, asking public servers for public information that t…

I'm not even sure why this is garnering press coverage . But, that's not going to stop me from jumping on the bandwagon. The short version is: Gail Mortenson, a freelance writer from Washington DC, lost her AOL account, which she had been using for business. So, her r…

I ran across this interesting press release the other day. It's from McAfee, talking about how their Secure Internet Gateway appliance compares to a similarly-positioned device from Barracuda. When comparing the two devices for spam filtering over a two week period, the …

Back in March, Mark Brownlow posted some good info on his Email Marketing Reports site about list rentals, list purchasing, and co-registration. Is list purchasing a good idea? "With very, very few exceptions, purchasing a bulk list like this is a shortcut to email mark…

As I said to Ken Magill for his recent article regarding Truthout : From what I know of how spam blocking works, and how ISPs make the determination regarding what mail to block, I don't think Truthout's issues (being blocked at Hotmail and AOL) relate to their politics…

I'm now utilizing “ second stage ” filtering, using the primary Spamhaus blacklist, the SBL . For me, it's an experiment. I just wanted to see how well it works and what kind of mail it catches. I know that a large number of email addresses are now behind this kind of f…

MailChimp is looking for a few good....monkeys. Ha.

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…

You can catch anti-spam professional (and Internet for Dummies author) John Levine on TV tomorrow. He writes: Last year I helped some Canadian film makers do a TV show called "Spam, the Documentary". Now US viewers can see it on Court TV tomorrow Sept 18th at 11pm…

In "Will the Real Spam Please Stand Up?," Kevin Stirtz disagrees with the statement , "until a user has opted-in to your email list, you are sending spam." All fine and good. Nothing wrong with a bit of disagreement. I'll prove it: I disagree! Do a…

Look, it happens to everyone. Run a large network some time. Put a Windows box, or two, or a thousand, on it. Eventually somebody will find a way to bypass the Anti-Virus, and there'll be an infection. I've had to call a big company here or there, having traced a spam…

From noted anti-spam professional and "Internet for Dummies" author John Levine: By my reading this is as close to a complete victory as Spamhaus could have hoped for. There was no chance the appeals court would throw out the default, since that would have been an i…

Hot off the press, courtesy of the excellent legal document site SpamSuite.com . Mickey Chandler breaks it down: The default judgment stays (e360: 1, Spamhaus 0) The money judgment is overturned (e360: 1, Spamhaus: 11,715,000) The injunction is overturned (e360: 1, Spamhaus: …

I see a very strange thing today (August 30th). APEWS, an "anonymous" anti-spam blacklist (whose listing policies are very broad and of questionable accuracy ) has taken down their home page. When you go to www.apews.org , what you find today is a memorial message. …

I hate blowback . Or call it backscatter , or outscatter , if you prefer. Either way, it's no fun. If your mail server sends it, you're contributing to a growing problem. I don't know what's worse: All the blocked messages from the poorly designed Barracuda ant…

If this isn't proof that it can happen to anyone, I don't know what is: Apparently MAPS has a compromised computer, found to be sending spam, and that IP address is now blacklisted. A recent post to the SPAM-L discussion list tipped me off. Someone there noted hits i…

Lots of talk about the "anonymous" APEWS blacklist lately. Over on DNSBL Resource, I summarize everything I've seen on the topic , and include some info regarding its effectiveness as an anti-spam filter against my own spamtrap and hamtrap. Additionally, I'v…

Internet email and security guru John Levine sums it up a lot better than I ever could, so I'll simply point you in his general direction . Update: John Levine pulled his post down, replacing it with this text: "This post has been withdrawn due to objections from Vir…