Links for 1/15/10

A lot has happened this week.
Spammers and scammers are attempting to steal money from people attempting to donate money to those in earthquake devastated Haiti. A number of places, including CNN and CAUCE, are warning people who want to donate online to do so through trustworthy links. Don’t click on links in unsolicited emails nor on random websites.
AOL laid off most of their postmaster team. This is going to have a significant impact on sender support provided by AOL. The background chatter I’m hearing indicates that there is likely to be response delays of days to weeks for support tickets.
Pivotal Veracity was acquired by Unica, a marketing software company. Industry buzz says that PV will be run as a subsidiary and maintain their independent customer base.
Spamhaus launched a new website, which includes a link for a domain based URI blocklist. There’s not much information available about this new blocklist, but it’s likely to function similar to SURBL and URIBL.
The lethic botnet was penetrated and disabled. Dark Market, one of the large credit card number trading sites, was taken down and the proprietor arrested.

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Time to step up

Neil Schwartzman reacts to yesterday’s link post.

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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.

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AOL layoffs and postmaster changes

As most of you probably know, AOL went through a serious round of layoffs yesterday. Unlike previous layoffs this one did hit the postmaster team pretty hard. Anna posted this morning that she was the only non-programming member of the postmaster team left in the US. This means there are a number of experienced folks looking for work with experience managing delivery for a large outfit. More info is on her blog.
While I don’t have any firm data, I expect that this is going to significantly affect the support that senders see from AOL. I know many of us have held up AOL as the poster child for how ISPs should interact with senders. That era is drawing to a close.
These layoffs come as AOL has migrated to a new mail system and a lot of senders are seeing new and different error messages. I do believe the folks handling the mail system and the migration are still there and are feverishly working to resolve problems caused by the migration. Right now things are in flux and senders should probably expect delays in getting support from AOL for delivery problems.
UPDATE: Matt Vernhout has a list of suggestions for how to deal with AOL delivery issues.

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