Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

The Apache Software Foundation just announced the release of SpamAssassin 3.4.0 via a message posted to the SpamAssassin announcements email list by project chair Kevin A. McGrail. Release notes menion that "this is a major release.  It introduces over two years of bug fix…

As reported over on the iDownload blog (and as mentioned to me by others), Gmail had a significant oops lately. Apparently, there was some system glitch that resulted in some actions (such as "delete" and "report spam" being applied to a message other than …

On January 9th, Google announced that your Google+ contacts (people in your G+ circles) will now automatically show up as contacts inside of Gmail. This isn't really a good thing, from my perspective. A lot of (OK, just about all of) my G+ connections are acquaintances or …

Hey! You can find the more modern, updated version of this question and answer here . Whoops @ the newsletter automation choosing this old article for inclusion in this a 2022 newsletter.

Michael Rathbun recently commented on my old 2007 post linking to his "Story of Nadine" website . He notes, "A while back I located an obituary notice for "Nadine". She still gets between 50 and 200 messages per day, all of which now feed the Spamcop se…

Open relays are back! Spamhaus shares the sad story that history is repeating itself and spammers are once again finding and exploiting open relaying mail servers to shovel spam at you. Fighting the open relay problem was a big part of my initial spam fighting efforts , back i…

Over at Word to the Wise, Laura Atkins reports on Scott Richter's domain registrar Dynamic Dolphin getting its accreditation yanked. I'm not sure why this took so long. This was one of those open secret kind of things that everybody talked about in the hallways at just…

Andrej writes, "Hello, I would like to ask you to remove my IP address from APEWS.org blocklist. Thank you very much." Andrej, thanks for reaching out. I wish I could offer you my assistance. But I cannot help you. Every once in a while, somebody will email me thinkin…

(Hat tip to:  Laura Atkins of WttW ) This is almost timely -- I was teed up to speak at a recent email/anti-abuse conference on the topic of Payday Loan marketers and what a challenge they can be, but had to bow out at the last moment. Thankfully, my colleague Mickey Chandler …

Over at Spamtacular, Mickey Chandler explains how one single submission  on one form resulted in his test account receiving hundreds of emails. This is a big part of why payday loan senders are such a deliverability nightmare; everybody seems to buy/sell/trade email addresses, …

Every once in a while, maybe every few days, I pull up my bookmark for the SBL Latest Additions and Removals over on spamhaus.org . It's usually pretty interesting to watch. It's basically the only public announcement that a new sender, ISP, ESP or ESP's client has …

Ars Technica reports: "Four plaintiffs filed a class-action suit in US district court in San Jose on Friday claiming that LinkedIn used its member's identities without consent and broke into their third party e-mail accounts to send promotional e-mails to the members&#…

Here's my take on it, and here's John Levine's take . I really like John's breakdown of the clickwrap license issue and detail on how the parties included email addresses in filings, leaving it to the judge to point out that this was totally unnecessary.

Do you know what a mail merge variable is? I used the term the other day in an email to a coworker and they were confused. An email list attribute? A personalization string? What do you call those? What does your email platform call those? You know, the bit where you put in DEA…

Do you have any other links to articles about Gmail's new tabbed inbox user interface? Leave details in a comment and I'll update the post. Let's start with two from Ken Magill: His August 20th article talking to Kirk Gray of APUS, and his August 27th article expl…

From his August 20th article talking to Kirk Gray of APUS: "The more I read about Gmail tabs, the more I think a bunch of folks are getting worked up over a whole lot of nothing." From his August 27th article quoting another author's extreme concerns: "You …

Over on CircleID, John Levine shares his thoughts on the default judgment in Zoobuh v. Better Broadcasting . Though it's a default judgment, the judge actually seems to have spent some time researching the law and didn't just blindly affirm everything the plaintiff pre…

Every couple of days, somebody new pops up on the DMARC-Discuss mailing list to ask some question or share an observation. It's great to see people interested and joining the conversation. Clearly, DMARC interest and adoption are growing. What's really frustrating, tho…

It's Twitter's turn to jump on the two factor bandwagon. I'm sad that it didn't happen sooner , but still happy to see them joining the ranks of Apple , Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Facebook . Please, please, please consider turning on two factor authentication…

I'm a big fan of two factor authentication. I've been using it on my Google accounts forever. Yahoo has it. Microsoft has it. Now, Apple has it, too! I'm very glad to hear this. I'll be setting it up for my account this weekend.

It's been a long time since I've noticed a new anti-spam blacklist (DNSBL) out in the wild. For more information, click on over to the DNSBL Chile article on DNSBL.com .

Brian Krebs reports on the arrest made in response to the recent massive distributed denial-of-service attack against anti-spam group Spamhaus. ( Hat tip: Laura Atkins )

Ken Magill posted today on " Why Fully Confirmed Opt-in Sucks ." It's definitely worth reading, and I hear where Ken's coming from. To "lose a subscriber" through their failure to confirm, that can really hurt when a list is pretty small. I should kn…

It looks like email permission is not the only challenge for some payday loan marketers. Case in point: This weekend I ran across this story on Slashdot explaining how a Wordpress plugin was hacked to include a link to a UK payday loan site .

In Laura Atkins' blog post where she shares her thoughts on COI , she links to this amazing article from the New Yorker, where Matthew J.X. Malady shares a bit of insight about the vast amounts of misdirected mail received at his own vanity Gmail account.