ArchiveFebruary 2013

Censoring email

It seems some mail to Apple’s iCloud has been caught in filters. Apparently, a few months ago someone sent a script to a iCloud user that contained the phrase “barely legal teen” and Apple’s filters ate it. The amount of hysteria that I’ve seen in some places about this, though, seems excessive. One of my favorite quotes was from MacWorld and just tells me that many...

Thoughts on bounce handling

This week’s Wednesday question comes from D. What are your thoughts on bounce handling There’s no specific standard for bounce handling as we often talk about it. While a lot of people will mention the RFCs, the RFCs only say what to do with a single email that gets a 4xy or a 5xy during the SMTP transaction. If the message gets a 5xy during the SMTP transaction, then the email MUST...

Opting customers in to new programs

Recently, I started getting “1 sale a day!” emails from buy.com. I’ve made purchases from Buy in the past and generally have been content to get emails from them. They’re not always relevant, but hey, it’s relatively non-intrustive marketing. When they started this new program, they just started mailing: no warning, no introduction, nothing. So I decided to opt out...

Irony

Saw this on twitter today:
Oh, the irony of an append vendor using COI for a whitepaper download.
No, I don’t know the vendor. But it doesn’t really matter. A lot of the vendors don’t have very good data.
 

Earthlink opens up FBL

Earlier this week I was at MAAWG and one of the Earthlink postmaster folks stopped me to tell me that Earthlink was now accepting non-ISP applications to their Feedback Loop.
In order to apply for the Earthlink FBL send an email to fblrequest@abuse.earthlink.net with the IP addresses and the FBL email address.

TWSD: Hiding the opt-out

This is an actual opt-out link that came in a recent email. Sadly, this is a real company, listed on the NYSE sent by a major ESP.
 

Verifying addresses after POS collection

Collecting email addresses at point of sale is a challenge. Some stores collect the addresses electronically, where the clerk or the customer types addresses directly into the register. Smaller stores, however, typically collect addresses on a sheet of paper at the cash register. Eventually someone takes the list and types it into whatever contact management system the store maintains. There are...

Fast and loose

Politicians often play fast and loose with permission and data. This can cause them all sorts of problems with email delivery at major ISPs. I really expect that politicians buy, sell, transfer, spindle, mutilate and fold data. If they can use it to further their goals, they will. And, many of the consumer protection and privacy laws don’t apply to political groups. The news that...

Spamming to hide fraud

An interesting article at NetworkWorld last month, describing spam bombs to victims of fraud and identity theft to hide the transactions and notifications from financial institutions. The targets are individuals, whose identity and personal information the thieves already have. The victims’ email inboxes suddenly get flooded with thousands upon thousands of emails — as many as 60,000...

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