Related Posts

Suing spammers

I’m off to MAAWG next week and seem to have had barely enough time to breathe lately, much less blog. I have a half written post, but it’s taking a little more research to put together. That can wait until I get the chance to do the research.
Instead I thought I’d talk about the North Coast Journal article “The Rise and Fall of a Spam Crusader.” It’s quite an interesting article and looks into the personal and business sacrifices that people make in order to chase down spammers.
In my experience a lot of the serial litigators have very poor practices around data collection and analysis. They don’t collect evidence, they just collect email and then make assertions and assumptions. This not every effective when having to convince a judge that you are right.
The article actually does nothing to change this impression. The cases ASIS won are the cases where the defendants didn’t respond. That also means that ASIS couldn’t collect.
I do disagree with Mr. Singleton, the lawyer, where he says CAN SPAM is dead. In many cases I’ve seen there aren’t clear CAN SPAM violations. So if he’s trying to sue these spammers under CAN SPAM his cause of action is wrong. Secondly, the article goes on to talk about the broader implications.

Read More

AOL Postmaster page hacked

Per Boing Boing: the AOL postmaster page was hacked over the weekend.
As of now the site is restored. But I’m hearing that all the scripts are still down. This means no one can open tickets, sign up for FBLs, apply for whitelisting or check the status of reports. I expect this will be fixed soon, but for now it looks like AOL issues are going to be impossible to resolve.

Read More

AOL transmitting 4xx error for user unknown

AOL is currently returning “451 4.3.0 <invaliduser@aol.com>: Temporary lookup failure” in some cases when they really mean “550 user unknown.” This message from AOL should be treated as 5xx failure and the message should not be retried (if at all possible) and the failure should be counted as a hard bounce for list management purposes.
This is something broken at AOL’s end, and the guys with the magic fingers that keep the system running are working to fix it. Right now there doesn’t seem to be an ETA on a fix, though.
Even if you are a sender who is able to stop the retries, you may see some congestion and delays when sending to AOL for the time being. Senders who don’t get the message, or who are unable to stop their MTAs from retrying 4xx mail will continue to attempt delivery of these messages until their servers time out. This may cause congestion for everyone and a noticeable  slowdown on the AOL MTAs.
AOL blog post on the issue
HT: Annalivia

Read More