How to improve AOL delivery

DMNews interviewed Charles before he left AOL about the state of spam and the challenges for ISPs and how that affects senders. The article was published this week. In it he talks about

  • The botnet problem and what AOL is doing to combat it
  • How AOL monitors its users
  • What kinds of things AOL measures for mail, including email sources and volume
  • How AOL leaves some filtering to users through the ‘this is spam’ button
  • Authentication

All in all a good article and worth a read for someone interested in what goes on behind the scenes at AOL.

Related Posts

Busy Busy.

Getting ready to head to MAAWG next week. We leave for the plane in a couple hours. I expect there will be some interesting information coming out of the talks and sessions and will be sharing some of the more interesting bits throughout the week.
Also, Steve has written a new tool to visualize blacklists. He’s put up a beta version. It still has a few bugs and missing features, but there are already some interesting patterns in XBL data with it.
The demo installation only displays XBL data (rather than letting you overlay multiple datasets) and is missing search and bookmarking, amongst other things. Enough disclaimers yet?

Read More

Wired editor has enough spam!

Seth Godin links to a post up over on The Long Tail about spammers who send PR mail to Chris Anderson, an editor at wired. Apparently lots of people send automated email to the editor of Wired hawking their latest and greatest product, service or photos.
In response to this overwhelming amount of mail, Chris has instituted a new email acceptance policy. He says

Read More

Do open rates matter?

Ken Magill over at DirectMag has an article deriding the reliance on ‘open rates’ as a metric for the success (or failure!) of marketing campaigns.

Read More