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, spammers are spending more and more time trying to steal good reputations to get their unwanted mail through.
Providers who follow these rules may still find themselves with spammers as customers, but the spammers will have to work harder to get on clean networks.

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Holomaxx doubles down

Holomaxx has, as expected, filed a motion in opposition to the motion to dismiss filed by both Yahoo (opposition to Yahoo motion and Hotmail (opposition to Microsoft motion). To my mind they still don’t have much of an argument, but seem to believe that they can continue with this.
They are continuing to claim that Microsoft is scanning email before the email gets to Microsoft (or Yahoo) owned hardware.

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MAAWG statement on email appending

MAAWG has published their position statement on email appending. It’s pretty explicit in it’s condemnation of the practice.

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Holomaxx status

Just for completeness sake, Holomaxx did also file an  amended complaint against Microsoft. Same sloppy legal work, they left in all the stuff about Return Path even though Return Path has been dropped from the suit. They point to a MAAWG document as a objective industry standard when the MAAWG document was merely a record of a round table discussion, not actually a standards document. I didn’t read it as closely as I did the Yahoo complaint, as it’s just cut and paste with some (badly done) word replacement.
So what’s the status of both cases?
The Yahoo case is going to arbitration sometime in July. Yahoo also has until May 20 to respond to the 1st amended complaint.
The Microsoft case is not going to arbitration, but they also have a response deadline of May 20.
I’m not a legal expert, but I don’t think that what Holomaxx has written fixes the deficits that the judge pointed out in his dismissal. We’ll see what the Y! and MSFT responses say a month from today.

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