A friend asked me the other day, what exactly is bulletproof hosting? Laura Atkins has complained before, on this very blog , that Google is a bulletproof hosting provider. Google doesn't exactly fit the criteria, but Laura's frustration was legitimate; stemming from Go…
Peter Seebach reports on spam he received from Netprospex , and how their lists might not be as "verified" as claimed. (Also note my previous post on bad advice from Netprospex , and feedback and opinions from others .)
My old friend Mike Horwath previously shared with us his experience with Newegg sending him spam. Now he's letting us know that one of his employees is also receiving spam from Newegg. I'm bummed; Newegg always seemed to be a great place to buy computers and electroni…
I had another thought today about Gretchen Scheiman's recent MediaPost article . (You can read my thoughts from yesterday here .) In Mickey Chandler's follow-up post , Gretchen commented and was careful to clarify that her position of "my inbox is open, come and g…
Gretchen Scheiman of OgilvyOne wrote a piece for MediaPost the other day, entitled, " Does Permission Need To Be Explicit? " It's an interesting read and she is most certainly entitled to her opinion. I'm not really going to debate the point with her; other re…
I never noticed this until now, but my friend Jess Henig wrote an article for FactCheck.org all the way back in 2008, talking about how forwarded emails filled with lies and balogna keep resurfacing . Crazy stuff, yet people keep forwarding it to each other. Obama is supposedly…
In addition to my own post mentioning the lawsuit , a number of other wise folks have commented on the Holomax lawsuit(s) against Microsoft and friends. None of whom seem to think Holomaxx has much of a chance of winning when going up against the ISPs. Ken Magill: A HolomaXx W…
Laura Atkins beat me to it, writing about this new MarketingSherpa case study wherein a company decimated their list and actually grew revenue. Go read her taken on it over at the Word to the Wise blog .
From TechEye.net: [Email sender Holomaxx is alleging that] “Microsoft knowingly relies on faulty automated filters and equally faulty third party information to identify purported spam emails,” said the suit. “Even after Holomaxx informed Microsoft that it was not sending spam …
Here are quick links to all four posts in my past three part series (uh, what?) on CAN-SPAM Myths. CAN-SPAM Myth #1: Applies Only to Spam CAN-SPAM Myth #2: This Law Makes it OK to Spam CAN-SPAM Myth #3: Password Protecting the Unsub Page is OK CAN-SPAM Myth #4: Doesn't Appl…
Chad White, Research Director for Smith-Harmon, published a great post yesterday on why image rendering is important for CAN-SPAM compliance . In it, he highlights an example email, where some sort of rendering issue results in the unsubscribe links and sender information to be…
I just posted information on changes to DNSWL.org over on DNSBL Resource . Looks like they're moving to a for-pay model, for at least large volume queries. Can't say that I blame them; if it is costing them money to keep their project alive, at some point it seems inevi…
The outbound mail servers used by Godaddy hosting customers appear to be blocklisted by the Abusive Hosts Blocking List (AHBL). Over in this Godaddy Community Forums thread , a Godaddy representative named ChrisG seems to be implying to complaining clients that AHBL is unrelia…
What does Scott Adams think? Selling customer data like email addresses to third parties is like selling expired, rotting milk to a foreign country that has no laws against that sort of thing. It may be totally legal, but you're setting up the buyer for a future failure. …
If you ask me, payday loans are a permission challenged industry, when it comes to email marketing. Companies are buying leads, selling leads, working with multiple data partners, emailing at a high frequency, always pushing to get more mail out, find new signup streams, etc. …
A reader wrote in with the following question/complaint about Senderbase.org . I'm going to post this one anonymously. The reader wrote, "I would like to request a review of senderbase.org. I would like to know if I am the only one that has communication problems with …
Venkat Balasubramani recaps the history of serial spam plaintiff Asis Internet over on his great Spam Notes blog. Nicely ties everything together.
Ken Magill, over on The Magill Report, had this to say about link blog Box of Meat : "I get a lot of story ideas from Box of Meat. It is No. 1 on my “favorites” list. It is the first blog I check every day because it always leads me in new, informative, unexpected directi…
In light of the various ESP-related data breaches we've seen, exposing various email lists to spammers and the world over the past couple of years, it seems this is something the email service industry ought to be keeping an eye on. A friend tipped me that Bill HR2221, the…
If you've ever received a spam email that had a bunch of random text at the bottom, text that didn't make sense or didn't relate to the rest of the email, you've seen hashbusting in action. Hashbusting is a spammer trick wherein they take blobs of text and app…
SOPHOS.COM.FELL.FOR.A.VERY.OLD.HACK.TODAY. I guess if you haven't been around for a while, you've never noticed that there are instances in WHOIS where you might look up a domain result and get a wacky hostname result back, too, because somebody on the internet though…
The current owner of SPAM-L , a long-time anti-spam discussion mailing list, announced on September 3rd that long-time subscriber Rich Kulawiec 's ability to participate in the list has been terminated. This appeared to be in response to Rich's caustic and threatening …
ARF (Abuse Reporting Format), a simple specification that enables senders of email abuse reports (like, spam complaints and feedback loop reports, for example) to easily and appropriately encapsulate those reports in a way that ensures the receiving site will have all the infor…