I wrote earlier this week about bad ways to evaluate and choose an ESP. It was all going to end today in an insightful and profound post telling all of you exactly how to find the best ESP. Then Smartinsights published an insightful and useful article on choosing an ESP yesterday. So, yeah, just go read what Jordie has to say. I have a couple other things to add, but I’ll drop those in...
Yesterday, I looked at the analysis of ESP delivery done by Mr. Geake. Today we’ll look at some of his conclusions. “Being blacklisted most likely suggests that sender IP either sends out to a great deal of unknown or angry recipients.” That’s not how most blocklists work. Most blocklists are driven by spam traps or by the personal mailboxes of the list maintainers. The...
One of my mailing lists was asking questions today about an increase in invitation mailings from Spotify. I’d heard about them recently, so I started digging through my mailbox to see if I’d received one of these invites. I hadn’t, but it clued me into a blog post from early this year that I hadn’t seen before. Research: ESPs might get you blacklisted. That article is full...
There’s a lot of variation in how ESPs respond to a report of one of their customers sending spam. Almost all ESPs will suppress future email to the recipient. Most will also note that there was a complaint about the sender, and use a count of those complaints for reporting, triage and escalation of problems. Beyond that, though, there’s little consistency. I sent a spam report to...
There was a discussion today on the OI list about email filtering that brought up something I usually don’t mention in delivery discussions. Most email marketers treat the inbox as the holy grail of delivery. Everything about delivery is focused on getting to the magical inbox. I think, though, that inbox is often just shorthand for “not landing in the bulk or spam folders.” For...
Venkat also commented on the Holomaxx v. MS/Y! ruling. As with blocking or filtering decisions targeted at malware or spyware, complaining that the ISP was improperly filtering bulk email (spam) is likely to fall on unsympathetic ears. It would take a lot for a court to allow a bulk emailer to conduct discovery on the filtering processes and metrics employed by an ISP. (Hence the rulings on a 12b...
Judge Fogel published his ruling in the two Holomaxx cases today. Defendant’s motion to dismiss having been granted, IT IS ORDERED AND ADJUDGED that Plaintiff’s complaint be dismissed without leave to amend and that the action be dismissed with prejudice. The full text of the rulings are available (Yahoo order, Microsoft order). There’s nothing very surprising here. The ISPs have immunity...
There’s been a heavy uptick in botnet spam over the last few days, judging by things I’m hearing and my own mailboxes. There are a few common subject lines, but all of them are trying to get recipients to either run programs or visit malicious web pages. The first subject line I’m seeing a lot of is “<name> wants to be friends with you on facebook!” In my...
[The harasser] was hitting me on email and twitter for more than [2100 messages], and the thing was, those all got past the filters I’ve got in place. So one obsessed crazy man with minimal technical skill and nothing but persistence outperforms all the spambots out there, at least on the scale of individuals, if not in breadth of attack. PZ Meyers Dr. Meyers goes on to suggest that spammers...
Late last year we wrote about the many problems with SORBS. One of the results of that series of posts was a discussion between a lot of industry professionals and GFI executives. A number of problems were identified with SORBS, some that we didn’t mention on the blog. There was an open and free discussion about solutions. A few months ago, there were a bunch of rumors that GFI had divested...
RSS - Posts