Comments on Holomaxx post

I’m putting together a longer analysis of the Holomaxx case that will look at the claims against the various defendants. There’s some deep mis-understanding of how various things works (hint: wiretapping? not so much).
There was one comment from “The Other Barry” about complaints that I think bears highlighting.

Silly people.  High complaints means filters need to be more aggressive.   “Not Spam” reports means the filters need to be less aggressive.  Low complaints means the filters are accurate.

The Other Barry is someone who has real world experience managing filtering for a large ISP.
In other comments, Steve White is excited to see ISP filtering come under judicial scrutiny. I’m not sure why, there is plenty of case law around filters already. There’s even US law stating ISPs can filter. But, hey, I’m sure some lawsuit from a company no one has ever heard of before will be sufficient to turn over 10 years of precedence.

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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 list, they added everyone who has ever registered to their mailing list. They did not send a “we have a new list, want to join it?” email, they added every registered user to the list and said “you can opt out if you want.”
This is such a bad idea. My own account was used once, to make one comment, back in 2005. Yes, 2005. It’s been almost 5 years since I last logged into the site. Sure, I have email addresses that go back that far, but not everyone does. That list is going to be full of problems: dead addresses, spamtraps, duplicates, unengaged and uninterested.
Seriously, they’re adding people who’ve not logged into their site in 5 years to a mailing list. How can this NOT go horribly wrong?
My initial thought was this was going to blow up in a week. I’m now guessing they’ll start seeing delivery problems a lot sooner than that.

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Should you respond to complaints

David Spinks asks on twitter:

Should you ever contact someone who made an abuse complaint about your newsletter to find out why

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The secret to dealing with ISPs

What is the secret to dealing with ISPs?
The short answer is: Don’t do it if at all possible. Talking to ISP reps generally isn’t going to magically improve your reptuation.  There is no place in the reputation systems where delivery can be modified because the delivery specialist knows or is liked by the postmaster at an ISP.
With my clients, I work through delivery issues and can solve 80 – 90% of the issues without ever having to contact anyone at the ISPs. 90% of the remaining issues can be handled using the publicly available contacts and websites provided by the ISPs.
In the remaining cases, the “secret” to getting useful and prompt replies is to:

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