Links for 9/2/09

People are still talking about the White House spamming. At Al Iverson’s Spam Resource there are two posts, one from Jaren Angerbauer titled Guest Post: Email and the White House and another from Al himself titled White House Spam, Signup Forgery, and GovDelivery. Both are insightful discussions of the spam that the White House has been sending. Over at ReturnPath, Stephanie Miller talks about how the publicity surrounding the spam is great PR for permission.
Stefan Pollard has an article at ClickZ looking at how an apology email in response to a recipient visible email mistake can actually make the fallout worse.
Web Ink Now documents one recipient’s experience with a bad, but all too common, subscription practice.
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Don’t forget to participate in the DKIM implementation survey. For ESPs. For ISPs. Check back next week for results.

Related Posts

Contact addresses and spam

One of the challenges anyone doing business on the internet faces is how to provide contact information so that potential customers can reach you in a form that spammers can’t easily abuse. Contact forms are the classic method, but they can (and are) abused by spammers. We decided to try something different. About 2 months ago, we started using rotating contact addresses. Every day a new address is deployed on the contact form on our website. Each address is valid for a fixed period of time, and is then retired.
This seems to be working well for us. Spammers are harvesting the email addresses, but because they are only valid for a fixed period of time, the amount of spam in my mailbox is not overwhelming. I am spending less time searching for sales mails through spam. An interesting side effect is I can actually see who is harvesting addresses and spamming.
It’s not perfect, I’m still getting spam to that address. But it’s spam at a level where I’m not losing real mail.

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DKIM implementation survey

DKIM has been a hot topic of discussion on some of my mailing lists today. One of the open questions is what is holding up adoption of DKIM. I have my own theories, but thought I’d throw out some questions to see how ESPs and ISPs are currently using domain based reputation.
I have set up two surveys one for ESPs and one for ISPs. Responses are anonymous.
I’ll collect responses for a week and share the results.

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Spam that's not spam

Steve and I were talking this evening and I mentioned to him that I got “a lot of spam that wasn’t really spam. Know what I mean?”
He did. But if I tell that to you, what does it mean to you?
More on this in a couple days, but I’m onsite at a client’s for the next few days so it may take me a plane ride home to put all the thoughts down.

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