Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

It's been just over five years since a particular goober harvested his LinkedIn contact list and spammed me and a bunch of other folks. Consider that the next time it happened, with somebody else doing it, was just now, I guess that means that it's safe to say that not…

Various online sites are reporting that Apple's iOS operating system version 10 is going to add support for the list unsubscribe header found in many email messages. In case you're wondering, it does sound like this unsubscribe feature supports the "mailto" ve…

Another spammer put under the microscope! Brian Krebs reports on the FBI arrest of Michael A. Persaud , reported to be one of the world's top ten spammers.

Ah,  Sanford Wallace . 1990s spammer, widely blocked and blacklisted, one of a few big bad spammers who made the rest of us realize that spam was a real problem and that we had to do something about it. Way back in 1999, in a Usenet discussion thread about Sanford, one of my fe…

"Send to Dad by Sunday midnight!" the email's subject line exclaims. My father is currently in hospice care. He isn't reading a lot of emails. He probably doesn't need this valuable offer. This reminds me a lot of the multiple "Don't miss out on M…

I have never liked capitalizing internet or web, previous versions of the AP Stylebook be damned. I guess I'm some sort of trailblazer or something, because now my way is the right way, because  the latest version of the AP Stylebook says it is no longer appropriate to capi…

Word to the Wise's Laura Atkins, like me, often gets asked about words to avoid in subject lines. Is it OK to use the word "free" in a subject line? I read that causes spam filtering! Not true, Laura patiently explains . Like Laura, I've been trying to explain…

Want to spam everybody who signed up for emails from Wisconsin governor Scott Walker during his failed presidential bid? That'll cost you $10,500 . Makes me wish I had signed up for his email list, so I could see what kind of junk he's allowing people to send through to…

Somebody asked me recently, what is phishing? Instead of re-inventing the wheel, allow me to link to a few of the resources already out there that explain what phishing is and why it is a problem. What is phishing? From Wikipedia : "Phishing is the attempt to acquire sensi…

Yahoo and Gmail both hit the news this past weekend, and not for great reasons. If you're an American Yahoo! Mail user and you want to email your congressman, good luck with that. Congress is apparently blocking access to Yahoo! Mail, in an effort to reduce malware infectio…

Today's guest post comes from deliverability consultant extraordinaire, my friend Josie Garcia. Take it away, Josie! Did you know that senders are in control of many more reputation and vulnerability factors than ESPs? Your ESP is in control of things like setting up an abu…

Over on the Mailop list, a postmaster shared his tale of woe involving sending mail to a small set of recipients whose mail server is behind a Cisco PIX firewall. You can tell if a receiving site is using a Cisco PIX firewall by telnetting to port 25 of the site's MX and s…

Some or all of verizon.net mailboxes are going to move to infrastructure hosted by AOL.  Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise reports that Verizon is saying this only affects users in Florida, Texas and California. My guess is all other Verizon email users' mailboxes will be t…

Today's guest post is from Brian Curry, Manager of Deliverability, for Merkle Inc.. Take it away, Brian! Since July of 2015, Google rolled out a shiny new tool for the Deliverability community to poke around and nerd out. We all know Google hasn’t always been the most trans…

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 …

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 be…

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…

(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 foun…

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. These are lists of IP addresses and/or netblocks of the worst of the worst -- networks tha…