Sitting at the gate, waiting for boarding I overhear a conversation. A woman is texting on her blackberry and saying to her traveling partner, “You know that universal sign for ‘not’? He thinks that is why mail is ending up in the junk folder. And if we add it to our mail then it will get delivered.” This is one of the strangest theories of email delivery I have heard in a...
Declan McCullagh writes today about the VA anti-spam law being overturned by the state supreme court. What’s notable about this law, and what made it vulnerable to First Amendment challenge, are two characteristics. The first is that it applies to the falsification of e-mail information, which could sweep in both spammers and, say, someone using a pen name or pseudonym. And we know, despite...
There will probably be light blogging here the next 2 weeks. Tomorrow I am off to a friend’s wedding down south and next Sunday I am off to the MAAWG meeting in Ft. Lauderdale for 4 days.
John Levine has a insightful review of the recent ruling against the VA anti-spam law.
The Virginia Supreme Court overturned the 2003 state law prohibiting sending unsolicited bulk email using false routing information, including phony domain names or IP addresses. “That statute is unconstitutionally overbroad on its face,” the ruling concludes, “because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails including those containing political...
Seth Godin posted recently about the overlooked secret of marketing: time Cherish my time. The second part is closely related. It has to do with respect. You respect my time when you don’t waste it. When you don’t spam me. When you worry about the 100 cars backed up on the road and figure out how to get us moving more quickly. You respect me when you value my time more highly than...
At BeRelevant Kath posts about common mistakes mailers make and how to recover from them.
Techcrunch50 is going on currently. There are a three email related businesses that have been pitched. AdRocket: Technology to insert contextual text ads, on a per subscriber basis, into existing newsletters. OtherInbox: A service allowing individuals to have their own subdomain for email, and an endless supply of email addresses at that domain. Postbox: A new way to organize, manage and annotate...
Last week Lashback posted a three part series on opt-in fraud. One of the issues they commented on is that suppression lists are being passed around and some mailers are actually spamming them. This is something that used to be common, where spammers were harvesting email addresses from opt-out forms and then spamming the addresses or selling them to other mailers. This is why some ISPs and anti...
There have been a couple posts recently about a paper presented at the Fifth Conference on Email and Spam (CEAS). The paper showed how addresses beginning with different letters get different volumes of spam. But this post is not really about the paper, although it is an interesting academic review of spam, it is more about a memory that the discussions triggered. Long ago I was handling the...
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