Light blogging for a while

Sorry for the lack of substantive posts, things seem to have gone completely out of control and I’m not finding a lot of extra cycles to sit down and blog. I’ll try and get some stuff up this week, but I’m also getting ready for MAAWG and the sessions I’m a part of there.
There was an interesting post by Romer over on his personal blog. If you don’t know, Romer helps maintain one of the commercial mail filters. He recently got spammed by one of his vendors and talked about how this is probably not the best idea. Al adds his own take on companies assuming permission. I’ve talked about taking permission in the past but haven’t touched on things like “spamming the guy who runs the filter.”
You’d be surprised, or maybe you wouldn’t, about how many people who run filters for large organizations get spammed regularly. You wouldn’t be surprised to find out that those people do factor in their own personal spam load when adjusting their organizational filters.

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Who's sharing data

Al has a post asking what people would do if their information was shared after opting out of any sharing.
It’s a tough call and one I think about as I see mail coming to my mailbox to such addresses as laura-sony and laura-quicken and laura-datran. All of these were addresses given to specific companies and where I attempted to opt-out of them sharing my data with other companies. Somewhere along the line, though, the addresses leaked and got into the hands of spammers.
Those addresses are overwhelmed with spams and scams. The frustrating part is there is no way to fix it. Once the addresses are leaked, they’re leaked. They will be receiving spam throughout eternity, even if the companies involved stop selling data or fix their data handling problem.
I don’t know what to do, honestly. If I think it was a one time thing, such as the addresses that started getting spam after the iContact data leak, then I’ll change my address at the vendor and retire the address the spammers have. But with other vendors, I don’t know what happened and I suspect the vendor doesn’t either, and so I can either deal with the spam or hope that I don’t lose real mail from that vendor.
There’s no easy answer. Any time you hand over an email address, or any other form of personal data, you’re trusting in the company, all of their employees and all of their vendors and partners to be honest and competent. This is often not the case.
What do you do?

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Still more spam stats

Mailchannels put together another post looking at spam volumes. Related to that, many people are reporting that bot levels are climbing again.

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How many people to enforce policy?

I’ve been head down working on a doc for a client and started wondering what the average size of an enforcement team is. This client told me during one of our calls they wanted to be as clean and well respected as another ESP, but was shocked when I told them how large an enforcement and delivery team that ESP maintained.
I know other clients of mine have 6 – 8 people for a very large customer base, and all of them take their job very seriously.
That got me to thinking: what is the average size of a policy and enforcement desk? Does it scale with userbase? Does it scale with the amount of mail you send? Is there a minimum size?
So tell me: how many people are on your policy and enforcement team?

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