Links

Venkat posts today about the ruling in the Asis v. Azoogle case. I have not yet had a chance to read the whole ruling, but in talking with Mickey over at SpamSuite it seems to expand the Gordon ruling a bit.
Mickey posts on Intellectual Intercourse about spam received from a recruiting agency trying to get him to hire one of their clients. This spam was amusing in that it contained reference to a bill that Mickey helped defeat years ago.
Box of Meat blog links to a CSO online article graphically demonstrating a botnet. The representation is really helps to understand the scope of the problem.
On Bronto Blog DJ posts about resurrecting old addresses. He has it right when he says: “If you continue to send email to customers that is random and unexpected, there will be consequences.”
Matt at ReturnPath has a couple posts about who should get delivery services and how ReturnPath chooses customers. This is something I end up dealing with occasionally. There are not specific types of companies I refuse to do consulting for. I will generally provide consulting on best practices to any business segment. My one restriction is that I will not provide ISP relations (ie, contacting the ISPs) for companies that do not send opt-in email. This has caused consternation with some potential customers.
Mark Brownlow at No Man is an iland suggests renaming “open rate” as “render rate” in an effort to make it much clearer what “open rates” really measure. Expect to see render rates referred to here on this blog in the future.
Josh talks about suppression list abuse on Deliverability.com. For those of us who use unique addresses for every signup, it quickly becomes clear that there are leaks in the suppression process. I have also seen problems with leaks from subscriptions, so do not think the problem is just in suppressions.

Related Posts

e360 in court again

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:

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Sender complaints about spamfiltering

JD posed a question in my post about Postini and trying to sort out a customer getting marked as spam by their filtering mechanism and I think it bears more discussion than can be done in comments.

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Goodmail

Goodmail made a splash on the email marketing and ISP industries a few years ago by announcing their CertifiedEmail program. They guaranteed that using their certification would result in email going directly to the inbox, and all images in the email would be displayed by default. Senders using Goodmail would pay money, per message, and Goodmail would split that money with the receiving ISP.
This sounds very much like a situation where everyone wins. The senders get their mail to the inbox with images turned on. The receiving ISPs get a little money to deliver email and offloads some of their sender screening onto a third party. Individual recipients know that this email is certified and that it’s safe to click on links in the email.
In the time since CertifiedEmail has been announced, however, there seems to be very little adoption. Sure, receivers do seem to be signing up, a little. AOL and Yahoo have been using CertifiedEmail for a while. In summer 2007, a number of cable providers announced they would be using CertifiedEmail as well.
Senders, on the other hand, don’t seem to be adopting this as fast as Goodmail might like. The Federal Government recently announced they would be sending email signed by Goodmail and some large online companies, Overstock.com among them, are also sending with certified email. In order to get more companies to sign up for CertifiedEmail, Goodmail announced in August 2007 that they had partnered with CheetahMail, Episilon and Axciom Digital to provide free CertifiedEmail to qualifying customers of those ESPs.
Why might companies not be adopting CertifiedEmail? I have a couple of thoughts.

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