ArchiveDecember 2012

Meaningless metrics

I’ve been having some conversations with fellow delivery folks about metrics and delivery and bad practices. Sometimes, a sender will have what appear to be good metrics, but really aren’t getting them through any good practices. They’re managing to avoid the clear indicators of bad practices (complaints, SBL listings, blocks, etc), but only because the metrics aren’t good...

Hotmail issues

A number of people, both at ESPs and on the mailops mailing list, are reporting problems at Hotmail. The most common reports are senders getting Site hotmail.com (65.55.92.152) said in response to MAIL FROM (452 Out of memory) during the SMTP session. There isn’t much senders can do about this. Hotmail is going to have to fix their resource issue. This may be limited to certain mail...

Winding down for the holidays

I’m frantically trying to get a couple client projects finished before next week so blogging will probably be light until the New Year.

Phones part of SMS botnet

Spammers have been moving into the phone market for a long time. Just recently security firms have discovered an Android  botnet. This botnet sends viruses over SMS, and when a link in the SMS is clicked, the phone is infected with the virus which then sends more SMS. The technology for blocking and reporting SMS spam is comparable to email blocking technology 10 or 12 years ago. There just...

Penkava v. Yahoo: dismissed

Carson Penkava, who was suing Yahoo! under California wiretapping laws, filed for dismissal with prejudice at the end of November. No reasons were given. Plaintiff hereby voluntarily dismisses the litigation with prejudice as to his individual claims and without prejudice as to the potential claims of any absent putative class members. The rights of absent putative class members will not be...

Volume! Volume! Volume!

Saw a series of tweets this morning from random consumers about holiday marketing volume. Some of the vendors I follow have gotten a little desperate. I’m getting an average of three emails a day saying “BUY OUR SHIT.” — Seanan McGuire (@seananmcguire) December 14, 2012 Sadly, this has resulted in the inverse of their intent: I am now not buying anything from any of them until...

There is no bat phone

I don’t have much to add to Al’s post about the lack of people to call at different ISPs to get mail delivered. I will say there was a time some ISPs had staff that would deal with senders and blocking problems. But those positions have gradually been eliminated over the last 2 or 3 years. In some cases the employees left for greener pastures, in others they were subject to layoffs...

Troubleshooting tools

There have been a number of comments on my post about Hotmail moving to SPF authentication having to do with troubleshooting authentication failures. I have been helping clients troubleshoot these issues, and am able to take on new clients to solve authentication problems. Contact me for more information. Of course, many of these issues can be solved with access to the right tools. Steve’s...

TWSD: Adapt to filters

This morning the new Yahoo! CEO posted about changes to Yahoo! mail. I logged into one of my Yahoo accounts to check and see if I had access to the new Yahoo! mail client yet. I don’t, but I did notice that spammers have adapted to the new Yahoo model of disabling filters in the mail folder. Most of the mail in my inbox has, at the very top of the message “Click not spam to enable...

Confirming addresses for transactional mail

A colleague was asking about confirming transactional mail today. It seems a couple of big retailers got SBLed today for sending receipts to spamtraps. I talked a few weeks ago about why it’s important to let people unsubscribe from transactional email, and many of those same things apply to confirming receipts. First, let’s look at what Spamhaus has to say. Initially they listed the...

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