Al has another post about another company sending mail to a customer that gave an email address that didn’t belong to them. The person receiving the misdirected email has no effective way to make it stop, and is getting more and more frustrated with the ongoing spam. (Consumerist article)
On August 1 two domains in the Netherlands are going away: wanadoo.nl and orange.nl. Current users of these domains are being transitioned to new addresses at online.nl. Mailchimp has more information and links.
This is a good time for all of us to consider how easy it is for a subscriber to change their address of record. Some senders just have the subscriber unsubscribe from one address and resubscribe for another. This sounds like the simplest way to do things, and it certainly doesn’t take much engineering effort.
But what information do you lose by simply asking subscribers to unsubscribe and resubscribe? It depends on what you’re tracking, but you do lose everything that you track. Preferences, interaction history, purchase history, it’s all gone. Providing a simple way to change an email address of record preserves the information related to that subscriber.
For some senders, keeping subscriber information through different ISPs and email addresses will pay for the development of a preference center. For others, there’s no real value there. How much money are companies leaving on the table by not providing a mechanism for recipients to change their email address?
A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about handling abuse complaints. As a bit of a throwaway I mentioned that new companies don’t always think about how their service can be abused before releasing it on the unsuspecting internet.
Today’s blog post by Margot Romary at the Return Path In the Know blog reminds me that it’s not always new companies that don’t think about abuse potential before launching services.
One of the things that never ceases to amaze me about phishers is how incredibly creative they can be in writing text that encourages recipients to open their emails.
There have been two separate incident recently that inspired me to talk about phishing.
The first was watching viruses propagate through my local neighborhood mailing list. I live in Silicon Valley and we do have an email list for neighbors to talk, plan and generally share information. Last week one of the neighbors got infected with a virus, and their address started posting links to more viruses to the list. Over the weekend I watched half a dozen neighbors get infected and post more viruses to the list.
The second is the dozens of messages I’ve been receiving telling me there are naked photos of me on the Internet. They have a couple different forms. Some pretend to be concerned friends worried that my private photos have leaked. Others threaten legal action or that the police are investigating me. Still others tell me I’ve ruined a friendship by sharing these photos.
None of those things are true, of course. They’re all trying to get me to open a file and infect my machine with some virus or another.