ArchiveMay 2013

TWSD: avoid filters

I was cleaning out one of my spamtraps. This is the one that gets a ton of “legitimate” spam. In the last 12 hours it’s gotten spam advertising: T.G.I.Fridays, KFC, Applebees, LendingTree, Lasix Vision Institute, Khols, Burger King, Match.com, and Vistaprint. The footer of some of the mails are making me laugh, though. It’s clear they’re trying to comply with CAN...

Gmail's new inbox tabs. News at 11.

Yesterday Gmail announced a change to their UI. This new UI lets users configure tabs in their inbox for different sorts of email. This change has greatly upset some marketers. Yesterday I heard it described as war on marketers, as a conspiracy to stop all email marketing and as a horrible injustice to legitimate marketers. I even saw a few people call for an organized boycott of Google AdWords...

Michele Bachmann Announces She's Done

U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) announced today that she’s not going to seek re-election in 2014. Last time around, the race between her and Minnesota businessman Jim Graves was very close. Mr. Graves lost by a very narrow margin. Graves had already announced his intention to take on Ms. Bachmann again next year. As the news came out on Bachmann’s decision, both...

Can I join…

On a post from earlier this week, John asks about joining the blocklist doc I mentioned. This is actually a document coming out of M3AAWG and you must be a member of M3AAWG to participate. If you are a member, you can log into the website and join the working group.
This document will be made available to the public once the membership and the board approves it.

DKIM and DomainKeys, Spam and Ham

I’ve been preaching “DKIM is great! DomainKeys is obsolete, get rid of it!” for several years now. I thought I’d take a look at my mailbox and see who was using authentication. I’ve divided this into “Ham” and “Spam”. Spam is, well, all the spam I’ve received over the past couple of years. Ham is the non-spam mail in my inbox, whether...

Uploading your address book to social media

I am one of the moderators of a discussion list working on a document about getting off blocklists. If anyone not on the list attempts to post to the list I get a moderation request. One came through while I was gone. Now, I don’t really think Jim Mills wants to be friends with a mailing list. I think he probably gave LinkedIn his email password and LinkedIn went through and scraped...

Seedy underworld

ESPs have to deal with spammers, phishers and scammers getting onto their networks. Mailgun talks about some of the things they’ve found our about these problem customers.

Thanks, Al

A giant, very public thank you to Al for volunteering to mind the blog while Steve and I made an emergency trip to the UK. There was once or twice I noticed something that I thought “I should take a second and blog about this” only to discover Al was way ahead of me and had already posted it. Both of us picked up some sort of ugly cold while we were there so it will be a couple days...

Auto-opt-in?

Bronto’s Chris Kolbenschlag frames the discussion well: He purchased from an online retailer, they assumed he wanted to receive followup emails, and thus, those emails did eventually commence. This is something I’ve had a lot of experience with. Working for an e-commerce service provider from later 2000 through mid 2006, I was the guy setting permission policy, dealing with spam...

The FBI in my Inbox?

It’s alarming to read that, depending on whom you believe, the FBI feels it has the legal right to access your email messages without having to obtain a search warrant. I know I don’t have anything particularly damning in my personal email account, but it’s the principle of the matter that’s the problem. (And consider errors and leaks. Nothing in my email inbox is going to...

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