ArchiveNovember 2013

November 25, 2013

Private whois records hide spammers and help bring down a registrar

By laura

3 Min read

1 comment

25November

I’ve talked in the past about how many spam filters, ISPs and blocklists treat domains that are registered behind privacy protection. I’ve written about how many commercial domains behind privacy protection are used for fraud. I’ve written about multiple legal cases where the courts ruled against companies using privacy protected domains in email. I’ve even gone so far as...

November 22, 2013

Do Gmail tabs hurt email marketing?

By laura

3 Min read

5 comments

22November

Earlier this year, Gmail rolled out a new way for users to organize their inbox: tabs. Tabs were an attempt by Gmail to help Gmail users organize their mail, particularly programmatically generated email like social media alerts and marketing mail. While many of us took a wait and see approach, a number of email marketers took this as one of the 7 signs of the apocalypse and the end of email...

November 21, 2013

Hotmail having a bad day

By laura

1 Min read

1 comment

21November

Looks like Hotmail / Microsoft is having a rather bad day. Their DNS seems to be intermittent. While they were down a while ago they were returning SERVFAIL for some DNS lookups, including MX lookups. For senders who have the DNS data in their recursive resolvers, this will have no impact. For senders who either don’t have the data cached or who have the data expire before the servers come...

November 20, 2013

Holiday mailing advice from mailbox providers

By laura

1 Min read

Add comment

20November

Christine Borgia has a post on the Return Path blog where she interviews a number of different groups (spamfilters, DNSBLs, mailbox providers) about their filtering strategy for the holidays. Overall, no one changes their filtering during the Holiday Mailing Season. On the other hand, many marketers do change their marketing strategies in ways that trigger more filtering and blocking. The take...

November 19, 2013

Unsubscribing from spam, part 2

By laura

1 Min read

3 comments

19November

Yesterday I posted about why the reasons a lot of people give for not unsubscribing from spam are mostly wrong. Unsubscribing from spam doesn’t seem to confirm your address and it doesn’t seem to increase your spam load. But does that mean you should unsubscribe from spam? I’m not sure about that. I’ve been working on a project where I am unsubscribing from every message...

November 18, 2013

Don't unsubscribe from spam!!

By laura

3 Min read

7 comments

18November

Having been around the email and anti-spam industry for a while, I’ve just about seen and heard it all. In fact, sometimes I’ve been around for the beginning of the myth. One myth that seems to never actually go away is “unsubscribing just confirms you’re a real address and your address will get sold and your spam load will explode.” This is related but orthogonal to...

November 15, 2013

Feel good Friday

By laura

1 Min read

Add comment

15November

I’ve told myself I can’t stop working until I post. Sadly, I can’t think anything useful to post. It’s been one of those weeks where I had some tricky and complicated client issues to work through. I can think of a lot of things to say, but I don’t want co compromise any client information. I wouldn’t do it on purpose, but I am very careful not to...

November 14, 2013

Can someone explain to me…

By laura

1 Min read

3 comments

14November

What this disclaimer means? You are receiving this email because you have a customer relationship or have opted-in to an email list managed by the Emailing Entity listed below. This email was not sent to you by the company or website identified in the offer above, for which we have a separate business relationship. We have represented to such company or website that we have the affirmative right...

November 13, 2013

Yahoo now auctioning domain names

By laura

2 Min read

Add comment

13November

This summer Yahoo shook up the email ecosystem by publicly announcing they were recycling usernames. The shakeup wasn’t so much that they were recycling usernames, but that they did it in a way that compromised user information and account security. Any user that had an account tied to a recycled Yahoo account is at risk for having their PII leaked. Folks are still dealing with the fallout...

November 12, 2013

Payday loan mail

By laura

1 Min read

Add comment

12November

Mickey has a great story of what happened when he gave a lead gen company his email address. Over 200 emails in 2 weeks from companies that seem unrelated to the signup company. It’s this behavior by PayDay senders that causes their mail to be filtered and has caused many, many ESPs just to prohibit that kind of mail on their systems. It’s very much the ugly underbelly of email...