Archive2010

Merry Christmas

We’re slowing down for the end of the year. Blogging will be light the next week.
See you in the New Year!
Laura, Steve and the cats

Broken signup processes

DJ Waldow wrote a post on explicit permission over on Mediapost. I think he hit on some interesting bits and wanted to comment on them. In order to comment on a Mediapost blog, you have to register. I’ve thought about it before, but every time I start the process I get to the page asking for detailed demographic information and decide no. This time, I was inspired enough by DJ to get to the...

AOL goes kablooey

Sometime last night, AOL managed to delete their MX records, causing mail to hard bounce for at least 3 hours, possibly more. Annalivia noticed, contacted the NOC, appropriate people were paged and the records are now functional again. This morning AOL seems to be having more mail problems, possibly related to everyone retrying mail that was hard bounced last night after the MX record was deleted...

Email and law in the news

A couple things related to the intersection of email and law happened recently. The 6th circuit court ruled that the government must have a search warrant before accessing email. The published opinion is interesting reading, not just because of the courts ruling on the law but also because of the defendant. Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals toyed with spamming to advertise their product as a brief...

Email marketing ulcers for the holiday

I’ve mentioned here before that I can usually tell when the big ISPs are making changes to their spam filtering as that ISP dominates my discussions with current and potential clients and many discussions on delivery mailing lists. The last two weeks the culprit has been Yahoo. They seem to be making a lot of changes to their filtering schemes right at the busiest email marketing time of...

Canada passes anti-spam bill

Call it C-28, call it FISA, call it COPL, just don’t call it a pipe dream any longer. Today the Canadian anti spam law received royal assent and is now law. ReturnPath is saying it will take effect September 2011, but that’s the only date I’ve seen published. The full text of the bill as passed by the House of Commons can be found at It’s fairly dense and I’m still...

Holomaxx dismisses part of lawsuit

Ken announced yesterday that Holomaxx dropped their suits against Ironport and ReturnPath. Suits against Yahoo and Hotmail are still active. In the Yahoo case, there is a case management meeting on January 14th. In the Microsoft case, a response the complaint is due by December 17th. I’m not quite sure what happened to prompt this change, but I think it makes it even more unlikely that the...

Now you know…

The key to email marketing, at least if you read blogs and talk to experts who blog about such things, is to segment your lists. But what does segmenting your lists really mean? Ken touches on it in a recent article about engagement and segmenting. Segmenting your list means, quite simply, knowing your audience. It means tailoring your message to them, in order to extract as much money from them...

TWSD: lie about the source of address

A few months ago I got email from Staff of Norman Rockwell Museum of Vermont, to an addresses scraped off one of my websites. At the bottom it says: You are receiving this email because you have ordered from us, or emailed us in the past. We take your privacy seriously,and promise never to give your personal information to any other company. Most people probably wouldn’t know that for the...

Office cat says

All work and no cat petting makes for a very cranky, and in the way, cat.
Return Path has turned our recent series of blog posts about SORBS into a handy list for what people SHOULD do when they’re intending to run a blocklist. More regular posting will return next week.

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