Garbage in… garbage out

Ken Magill (hereafter known as Mr. Stupid Poopypants) has a follow up article today on his article from last week about the Obama campaign’s mailing practices. While poking Dylan a bit, his message is that marketers really need to look harder at double opt-in.

All these things can and do go wrong with double opt-in, but the risks of not using it have simply become too great. For one thing, if a marketer gets blacklisted by, say, Spamhaus, and the mailer is not using double opt-in, the folks at Spamhaus will force the issue.
On the plus side, marketers using double opt-in don’t get blacklisted by Spamhaus because they never hit Spamhaus’s traps—fake e-mail addresses set up to catch spammers.
Also, fake signups are nothing to get worked up about. They are simply a fact of e-mail list building that the marketer must guard against or accept the inevitable consequences. It is solely up to mailers to keep their lists clean, and no one else.

Data verification is a necessary and critical bit of email marketing on today’s internet. For many marketers, the only solution may be to move to double opt-in.

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7th circuit court ruling in e360 v. Spamhaus

Mickey has some commentary and the full ruling up on Spamsuite. In short the appeals court affirmed the default judgment, vacated the judgment on damages and remanded the case back to the lower court to determine appropriate damages.
There are a couple bits of the ruling that stand out to me and that I think are worthy of comment.
Spamhaus made a very bad tactical decision by initially answering and then withdrawing that answer. The appeals court ruled that action signaled that Spamhaus waived their right to argue jurisdiction and that they submitted to the jurisdiction of the court. Based on this, the appeals court upheld the default judgment against Spamhaus. Not necessarily the outcome any of us wanted, but that doesn’t set any precedent for future cases unless defendants answer and then withdraw the answer. Specifically on page 12 of the ruling the court says:

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Update on Yahoo and the PBL

Last week I requested details about Yahoo rejections for IPs pointing to the PBL when the IP was not on the PBL. A blog reader did provide me with extremely useful logs documenting the problem. Thank you!
Based on my examination of the logs, this appears to be a problem only on some of the Yahoo! MXs. In fact, in the logs I was sent, the email was rejected from 2 machines and then eventually accepted by a third.
I have forwarded those logs onto Yahoo who are looking into the issue. I have also talked with one of the Spamhaus volunteers and Spamhaus is aware of the issue as well.
The right people are looking at the issue and Spamhaus and Yahoo are both working on fixing this.
Thanks for the reports and for the logs.

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SpamZa: corrupting opt-in lists, one list at a time

A number of ESPs have been tracking problematic signups over the last few days. These signups appear to be coming from an abusive service called SpamZa.
SpamZa allows anyone to sign up any address on their website, or they did before they were unceremoniously shut down by their webhost earlier this week, and then submits that address to hundreds of opt-in lists. This is a website designed to harass innocent recipients using open mailing lists as the harassment vehicle.
Geektech tested the signup and received almost a hundred emails 10 minutes after signing up.
SpamZa was hosted on GoDaddy, but were shut down early this week. SpamZa appears to be looking for new webhosting, based on the information they have posted on their website. 
What does this mean for senders?
It means that senders are at greater risk for bad signups than ever before. If you are targeted by SpamZa, you will have addresses on your list that do not want your mail. Some of those addresses could be turned into spam traps.

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