ArchiveOctober 2012

Poisoning Spamtraps

Today’s question comes from Dave in yesterday’s comment section. I wonder if spammers might submit harvested addresses to big-name companies known to not use confirmed opt-in just to poison what they believe might be spamtraps? It’s certainly possible that people submit addresses to forms and big-name companies. But I don’t really think that poisons the spamtrap. Depending...

Harvesting and forging email addresses

For the contact address on our website, Steve has set up a rotating set of addresses. This is to minimize the amount of spam we have to deal with coming from address harvesters. This has worked quite well. In fact it works so well I didn’t expect that publishing an email address for taking reader questions would generate a lot of spam. Boy, was I wrong. That address has been on the website...

MAAWG presents the first J.D. Falk award

Last week at MAAWG went much like all MAAWG conferences go: too much to do, too many interesting panels to attend, too many people to connect and work with, a plethora of very interesting keynote speakers and a total lack of sleep. Most of what happens at MAAWG is not public, but some of the events are. One of the things that I can talk about is the J.D. Falk award. This award was established by...

Setting up DNS for sending email

Email – and email filtering – makes a lot of use of DNS, and it’s fairly easy to miss something. Here are a few checklists to help: Data you need before you start: [table] Information,for example Return path / bounce address,bounces.myesp.com Mailserver hostname,mail4.myesp.com Mailserver external address,192.0.2.4 DKIM “d=”,greatbigmarketer.com DKIM selector,oct2012...

Retrying mail to AOL

I’m working on stuff for MAAWG so I’m really not all that up on what’s happening in the world of email recently. A lot of folks are commenting on my AOL post, and I’m hearing that queues are backing up and emptying as AOL makes changes. One thing people have been asking me is if they should retry mail to the addresses that are bouncing. I say yes, absolutely. Some of the...

Mail problems at AOL

We cannot help endusers troubleshoot AOL connection problems. Please do not call. Please do not write. You need to talk to AOL. We are not AOL. We cannot help you.    Over the last few months there have been ongoing mail problems at AOL. These problems are all over the map and are resulting in a lot of delayed and unsent email. People are reporting a number of different error messages from...

Canadian anti-spam regulations

Canada passed an anti-spam law in 2010. Implementation of this law (CASL) were initially scheduled to go into effect in 2011. That deadline has passed and it’s not looking good for a 2012 date, either. Canada’s Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission is the agency responsible for enforcement and rulemaking. This week they published 2 bulletins to help guide companies on how...

Can I assume consumer and business filtering is the same?

Today’s question comes from Steve B. I wondered if you know much about hosted email providers such as google apps, Microsoft and yahoo. I have seen a rise in number of people using them to provide their corporate email service.   I am using the same logic that the rules governing delivery to gmail will effect those using google hosted email for example.  For Microsoft i have  been using...

Subject lines

There has been a lot of discussion in various places recently about subject line length and how it affects email marketing. There have been multiple studies done on how the subject line affects opens and clicks. (Mailchimp, Alchemy Worx, Mailer Mailer, Adestra). The discussion has even spilled over into Ken Magill’s newsletter today. I’ve had a couple people ask me my opinion on...

Want to learn about Networking and the Internet?

You can trust the “experts” that populate Facebook. Or you can take An Introduction to Computer Networks from Stanford University. This is an introductory course on computer networking, specifically the Internet. It focuses on explaining how the Internet works, ranging from how bits are modulated on wires and in wireless to application-level protocols like BitTorrent and HTTP. It also...

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