ArchiveAugust 2010

The cult of SPF lives

Years ago, prior to the public discussions of Domain Keys, there was SPF as the solution to all our email authentication problems. SPF was going to let people do all sorts of things with email. The proponents even privately asserted that it would solve the spam problem. In essence, SPF was a cult. BoF sessions at meetings had the flavor of a big tent style revival. Those of us who didn’t...

Email marketing is hard

I’ve watched a couple discussions around the email and anti-spam community recently with a bit of awe. It seems many email marketers are admitting they are powerless to actually implement all the good advice they give to others. They are admitting they can’t persuade, cajole, influence or pressure their companies to actually follow best practices. Some of the comments public and...

Botnets and viruses and phishing, oh my!

MessageLabs released their monthly report on email threats yesterday. Many media outlets picked up and reported that 41% of spam was from a the Rustock botnet. Other highlights from the report include: Spam accounts for over 92% of all email. 95% of spam was sent from botnets at the end of July 2010. One in 327 emails contains malware and one in 363 emails is a phish. The number of rustock...

Goodmail for sale?

The first edition of the Magill Report dropped in my mailbox (and the mailboxes of lots of other people judged by my twitter feed) this afternoon. In his newsletter, tucked between an announcement of a new DMA CEO and rather depressing news about how long it’s taking to find jobs, he announced that Goodmail is being offered for sale. It seems that an investment banking firm is offering a...

Social Networks and Email

There’s been a steady trickle of “Email is Dead!” announcements over the years. 2005 – Pew Internet announces “email may be at the beginning of a slow decline” 2006 – USA Today announces “Email has become the new snail-mail” 2009 – The Wall Street Journal announces “The End of the Email Era”. That’s not surprising, and...

Spamhaus and Gmail

Today’s been chock full of phone calls and dealing with clients, but I did happen to notice a bunch of people having small herds of cows because Spamhaus listed www.gmail.com on the SBL. “SPAMHAUS BLOCKS GOOGLE!!!” the headlines scream. My own opinion is that Google doesn’t do enough to police their network and their users, and that a SBL listing isn’t exactly a...

Is your data secure?

Not just secure from outside forces, but also secure from employees? In a recent survey published by Help Net Security, approximately half of all employees said they would take data, including customer data, when leaving a job. This has major implications for ESPs, where employees have access to customer data and mailing lists. There are at least 2 cases that I am aware of where employees have...

The return of the Magill Report

After a 6 month hiatus, Ken Magill has returned to offer his insightful, and somewhat snarky, take on email marketing. You can subscribe at The Magill Report. Ken is really trying to make this report an example of how to do ad supported email newsletters right. When I subscribed yesterday I received the following welcome message: Please click here to confirm your subscription to The Magill Report...

How not to build a mailing list

I mentioned yesterday one of the major political blogs launched their mailing list yesterday. I pointed out a number of things they did that may cause problems. Today, I discovered another problem. This particular blog has been around for a long time, probably close to 10 years. It allows anyone to join and create their own blogs and comment with registered users. As part of their new mailing...

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