As I’m sure many of you have heard by now there is a new blocklist called ‘nszones.’ This blocklist is apparently stealing data from a number of other publicly accessible blocklists, combining the data and then charging folks for delisting. This is a scam attempting to extort money from people. The blocklist has no way to actually remove IPs from the parent zones and I’m...
Listen to the experts
Two blog posts came out today interviewing big players in the email and delivery arena. Over on the Unica blog, Len Shnyeder interviews Annalivia Ford who is a new member of their email operations team. She has had many years of experience in dealing with senders from the receiver position. She summarizes successful delivery as follows: the bottom line really is simple, if not easy: to succeed...
When an open is not a sign of interest
A lot of people, including myself, are using opens as one of the measures of engagement. This, as a general rule, is not a bad measure. However, there are people who will open email not because they’re interested in it, but because they know it is spam. Take, for instance, the email address I acquired in 1993. Yes, I still have this address. I stopped using it to sign up for lists in 1999...
This is why the ISPs throw up their hands at senders
I recently saw a question from an ESP rep asking if anyone had a personal contact at a particular ISP. The problem was that they had a rejection from the ISP saying: 571 5.7.1 too many recipients this session. The ESP was looking for someone at the ISP in order to ask what the problem was. This is exactly the kind of behaviour that drives ISPs bonkers about senders. The ISP has sent a perfectly...
Return Path Changes certification standards
Return Path recently announced changes to their certification program. They will no longer be certifying 3rd party mailers. We will no longer certify mail streams which are strictly comprised of “third-party marketing” email (e.g., email-based advertising that is not accompanied by content and is sent on behalf of a different company than the one to which the end user subscribed in...
Define "spam"
A comment came through recently from Trent asking me to define spam. It’s been a while since I’ve talked about how I define spam, so let’s look at it. Personally, I describe spam as unsolicited bulk email. If I didn’t ask for it and it looks like bulk mail then I consider it spam. In many cases the spammers have multiple email addresses of mine so I can demonstrate the...
Delivery resources
I’m working on a few projects designed to help provide mentoring for other delivery people and to bridge the communication gap between the various groups active in email. One of those projects is collecting, linking to, and publishing more delivery resources. Some will be linked to directly from the blog, others will be linked to from the wiki. While I’m reasonably familiar with...
You want to sell me a list?
Over the years, some of my clients have found it expedient to give me email addresses at their domains. These addresses forward mail addressed to laura@clientsite to my own mailbox. Generally these are so I can be added to internal mailing lists and have access to their internal tools. It’s often amusing to see the spam that comes through to those addresses. Over the last few weeks...
I need to dodge filters
Number five of seven in our occasional series on why ESPs need, or don’t need, lots of IP addresses to send mail properly. I need multiple IP addresses per customer so as to manage filtering issues Why this is right If you have, for example, three dedicated IP addresses per customer and one of those IP addresses gets “randomly” blacklisted, then you can divert traffic to the other two...
Yahoo turns on images by default for RP certified IPs
ReturnPath announced today that images and links from Return Path Certified senders are turned on by default in the Yahoo mail interface. This affects many of the other domains using Yahoo for mail hosting including Bellsouth, SBC, Rogers, BT Internet and Rocketmail. Overall, I think this is something that Return Path can be proud of. Yahoo fiercely protects their users’ inboxes. They have...