At Adventures in Email Marketing, there is a post up this morning about political spam. It seems Anna discovered that providing her email address on her voter registration card not only results in political groups sending her email to that address, but also that political email does not have to follow the rules of CAN SPAM. The article ends with a few questions and makes some suggestions. In...
Mark Brownlow has a really good post up today about disposable and temporary addresses and how they affect marketers trying to build an opt-in list. I use tagged addresses for all my signups, and have for more than 10 years now. It lets me track who I gave an address to and if this mail is contrary to what I signed up for or the address has leaked, I can shut down mail to that address entirely...
Over at CircleID Aviram Jenik posts about using email addresses as identification and how that can go horribly wrong if the website does no verification. In his case, the problem is a user who has made a purchase using Aviram’s gmail address and Aviram now has access to the other users personal information. As he explains it: Most of this misguided email ranges from boring to funny, but...
On my followup EEC post Tamara comments The eec made a really bad and ugly mistake but you can take my word for it that they have learned from it and that it will not happen again. I am not going to blog about this because I really do believe in the value of the EEC and what it brings to the industry. It’s okay to call out a mistake, but do you really need to destroy an organization that is so...
Terry Zink has been posting articles about botnets as traced by Hotmail. I do not often talk about botnets as they are outside my area of expertise. They are not something I deal with, as no one who uses botnets is welcome as a client here. My clients and I, however, do have to deal with the fallout from botnets. Because of botnets, receiver ISPs are extremely suspicious of mail from any IP...
MySpace has won a 234 million dollar judgment against Walt Rines and Sanford Wallace. “MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on our site,” [MySpace Chief Privacy officer] Nigam said in a statement. “We remain committed to punishing those who violate the law and try to harm our members.” These are two of the spammers responsible for me learning...
Ken has a followup to his article last week about the EEC spamming. Multiple e-mails obtained by this newsletter clearly show VIV was prospecting the EEC member list from its servers in violation of the EEC’s own privacy policy. […] Moreover, one reader sent this newsletter two separate free issues of two different editions of VIV that were spammed into his inbox on two different days. So...
Chris Marriott over at iMediaConnection talks about all the reasons email is a non-starter as a replacement for direct mail. This is something I have been telling clients for a while now. Chris mentions a number of reasons for why email is not an acquisition tool. Today, banks can flood your mailbox with all the credit card offers they want, but they can’t flood your email box with the same...
The FTC announced today they will be publishing clarifications to CAN SPAM in the near future. According to the FTC The new rule provisions address four topics: (1) an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page...
Ben over at MailChimp has an article talking about a recent experience with Postini and an actual bug that causes Postini to interact badly with another spamfilter and block non-spam.
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