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.

Related Posts

Questions about CAN SPAM.

In the US, the law governing the sending of commercial email is CAN SPAM. I’ve seen a number of questions about CAN SPAM recently.
One came from twitter, where someone was asking if just having an email address meant permission to send to it. Clearly, just being able to dig up an email address doesn’t imply permission to send marketing or commercial email to it. I can promise you April23@contact.wordtothewise.com did not sign up to receive information on increasing Facebook followers.
CAN SPAM doesn’t prohibit unsolicited email. All it says is that if you send unsolicited email you must do a few things.

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Bit.ly gets you Blocked

URL shorteners, like bit.ly, moby.to and tinyurl.com, do three things:

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News and announcements: March 1, 2010

Some news stories and links today.
Spamhaus has announced their new domain block list (DBL). The DBL is a list of domains that have been found in spam.

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