Archive2011

SOPA / PIPA

I’ve not mentioned anything about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and it’s companion bill the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) that are currently making their ways through Congress. Both bills put a lot of obligation on the ISPs to stop bad traffic on the Internet. Unfortunately, it seems no one writing the bill asked anyone with technical or operational experience for input...

Bounce handling simplified

I am a strong believer that bounce handling should be designed to remove addresses that have no human on the other end while not removing addresses that have a real recipient on the other end. Bounce handling should be designed to appropriately manage your subscriber base. Delivery problems are the consequence if you don’t do that. They shouldn’t be the reason you bounce handle...

Email fingerprinting

I’ve had a lot of people ask me about what I mean by email fingerprinting. It means that I’m able to tell these 4 emails were all sent by the same entity. The domains are (mostly) different, the To: addresses are different, but I get hundreds of these emails a day. Different domains, different products, different to: addresses, different sending IPs. But clearly the same sender for...

Looking towards the future

I had the opportunity to go to a seminar and networking event hosted by Return Path yesterday evening. The topic was “Email trends in 2012” and it was presented by Tom Sather. If any of you get the opportunity to go to a talk presented by any of the Return Path folks I encourage you to do so. They know their stuff and their presentations are full of good information. One of the trends...

Think before you mail

I get quite a bit of unsolicited mail. I mean, sure, we all get a lot of spam, but that’s not the unsolicited mail I’m talking about. I’m talking about from people and companies in the email space. They want to make sure I’ve seen their new whitepaper or article about delivery. Or they have a question about something I’ve written here. Or they are looking to hire me...

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.

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