ReturnPath announced yesterday that SenderScore Certified now covers 1.2 billion inboxes, including mail handled by Hotmail, Time Warner Cable, GoDaddy and eventually Yahoo. A number of filters are also using SSC, including Spam Assassin, IronPort Systems, Barracuda Networks and Cloudmark.
Today’s edition of Magilla Marketing announced that Dave Linhardt and e360 have sued Comcast. Spamsuite.com has the text of the complaint up.
On the surface this seems quite silly. e360 is alleging a number of things, including that Comcast is committing a denial of service attack against e360 and locking up e360’s servers for more than 5 hours. Additionally, e360 is laying blame at the feet of multiple spam filtering companies, including Spamhaus, Trend Micro and Brightmail.
One of the more absurd claims is that Comcast is fraudulently transmitting ‘user unknown’ messages. At no point do they explain how or why they think this is the case, but simply assert:
Matt posted a discussion of the portability of IP reputation over at his EmailKarma blog.
I have heard about Hotmail/MSN’s claim that if you add your new IPs to your SPF/SenderID record and send from your old IPs that your old IP reputation will transfer to your new IPs. I’ve not heard it working in practice, but it really can’t hurt to add your new IPs to your records as soon as you know what they are.
Being a deliverability consultant, I end up signing up for a lot of lists and providing email addresses to a lot of different websites I may not normally trust with my email address. The only way to manage the resulting volume of email is using a disposable address system. There are a number of commercial versions, but we built our own system.
Any time I need to sign up with a client, I create a new email address. Part of the address creation process involves making notes about where and when the address was used. When mail is received at any of the email addresses I have used, that email is appended with the data I provided at the time I signed up and forwarded to a mailbox on my main system. If an address ends up compromised or sold and getting too much mail, I can just turn it off. This system allows me to freely hand out addresses, without a large amount of mail ending up in my primary mail box.
Disposable addresses great way to monitor what my clients are doing with my email address. I have found, in at least 2 cases, that my clients are doing nothing wrong, but there are leaks in their process that lets email addresses get out to spammers. My reports of data leaking were the first they knew about any problems with their vendors or customers.
I strongly recommend any marketer who shares any data, include in that data test or seed accounts. Sign up for your own lists, using unique addresses, so that you can see what kind of mail your subscribers are receiving once they sign up at your site. If you are providing data to customers or vendors, include unique test data in each list. If you start getting unexpected mail to those addresses, you can track back to the specific vendor with the data problem.
Your email address list is one of the biggest assets your company has. Protect that asset by monitoring what others are doing with it.