ArchiveNovember 2011

Gordon v. Virtumundo, the sequel

I was slightly surprised that Gordon was still pressing on with his case against Virtumundo. It seems that Mr. Gordon appealed, again, to the 9th circuit. James Samuel Gordon, Jr., appeals pro se from the district court’s summary judgment in his action alleging that defendant’s transmission of unsolicited commercial email or spam violated federal and state statutes. We have...

About that Junk Folder

I use a pretty standard mail filtering setup – a fairly vanilla SpamAssassin setup on the front end, combined with naive bayesian content filters in my mail client. So I don’t reject any mail, it just ends up in one of my inboxes or a junk folder. And I have a mix of normal consumer mail – facebook, twitter, lots of commercial newsletters, mail from friends and colleagues and...

Opt-in vs. opt-out

Jeanne has a great post up at ClickZ comparing the performance of mail to an opt-in list to performance of mail to an opt-out list. The article looks at opens, clicks and click through rates over 7 quarters (Q1 – Q4 2010; Q1 – Q3 2011) covering 330 million emails. I strongly suggest anyone interested go read the whole article. The short version, though, is that the opt-in lists had...

Listen to me talk about filtering, blocklists and delivery

I did an interview with Practical eCommerce a few weeks ago. The podcast and transcript are now available.
I want to thank Kerry and the rest of the staff there for the opportunity to talk email and filtering with their readers.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone in the US.

Having the same conversation

This morning I was reading a blog post about the failure of the congressional super committee. The author commented parties can’t reach an agreement if they’re not even having the same conversation. I realized this is just as true in email as it is in politics. All too often we’re not having the same conversation. Look at the comments thread on my spamtraps post. Steve Henderson and I...

More legal problems for Boris

Boris Mizhen is once again on the wrong side of legal action. This time it’s not as simple as Microsoft suing him for creating hundreds of thousands of accounts to try and game the spam scoring system. Instead, he seems to have run afoul of the FTC. This case isn’t obviously about email, but the FTC alleges that companies under the “control or influence” of Boris set up a...

Email lost a mighty advocate

Last night J.D. Falk passed away from stomach cancer. For those of us who were privileged to know him, it was not unexpected but it is still a sad day. CircleID has a memorial post up. I’ve known of JD since I started in email in the late ’90s. I had the privilege of meeting him when we moved out to the bay area and he invited Steve and I to the “sushi cabal” – a...

IP reputation and the bulk folder

I’ve spent much of today talking to various people about IP reputation and bulk foldering. It’s an interesting topic, and one that has changed quite a bit in the past few months. Here are a few of the things I said on the topic. Generally IPs that the ISP has not seen traffic from before starts out with a slight negative reputation. If you think about all the new IPs that an ISP will...

Vetting customers

MAAWG has published a BCP for vetting new customers. This is the culmination of much work by a lot of people. One of the best things about the document is the discussion of how spammers attempt to hide their identity. All too often I’ve been called in by ESPs to help them identify how a spammer got on their network and where their process failed. As filtering gets better at blocking spam...

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