Links: September 24, 2012

Last week Return Path announce a new set of email intelligence products. One of their new products offers customers the chance to actually see how (some subset of) their customer base interacts with mail directly. It moves beyond simply looking at probe mailboxes and actually looks inside the mailbox of recipients.
Spamhaus has listed bit.ly on the Domain Blocklist (DBL) for allowing spammers to abuse their redirector service. Spammers have been abusing bit.ly for a while, and I’m a little surprised it’s taken so long for a listing to happen. Steve wrote a post last year about URL redirectors and offered suggestions on what to do to avoid blocking problems when using a URL shortening service.
Real Insights has a very interesting post on why it should be “hard” to subscribe to your mailing list. There are also a number of good suggestions about the subscription process itself. Definitely worth a read.