Spam is not a valid marketing strategy

This seems like an attempt to create the next big viral marketing campaign. It’s just spam, though, and not even good spam. There’s nothing about a random “click here” that will entice me to click on it.
Scammers? Spammers? Whoever Ryann Rasmussen at HighSpeedInternet is, she might want to rethink her marketing strategy. It looks more like an infection attempt than anything else.
HSI_Spam
I guess we can say that their mail made an impression, a very negative impression. There is no website at http://highspeedinternet.com. The whois record for highspeedinternet.com is behind domains by proxy. The mail violates CAN SPAM. The address was scraped off our website.
Not all spammers are dodgy Russians. Some spammers are from Utah.

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Massive new phishing run

It seems while the experts are meeting to figure out how to stop spam, the spammers are exploiting new ways to spam. This morning my mailbox had over 100 messages with either the subject “market report” or “eviction notice.” What headers I checked showed this was from a botnet, sent to dozens of addresses at my domains.

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Unsubscribing from spam, part 2

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 coming into one of my email addresses. Weeks into that process I’m not seeing a huge decrease in the amount of mail that address is receiving. In some cases I’m unsubscribing from the same senders multiple times a day and have been for close to 3 weeks.
While unsubscribing doesn’t increase your spam, I’m also not sure it decreases your spam, either. But I’ll have full data and numbers demonstrating that in a few more weeks.
What can have an effect on the amount of spam you get is complaining about spam, at least according to Brian Krebs.

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Spam is not a moral judgement

Mention an email is spam to some senders and watch them dance around trying to explain all the ways they aren’t spammers. At some point, calling an email spam seems to have gone from a statement of fact into some sort of moral judgement on the sender. But calling an email spam is not a moral judgement. It’s just a statement of what a particular recipient thinks of an email.
There are lots of reasons mail can be blocked and not all those reasons are spam related. Sometimes it’s a policy based rejection. Mailbox providers publishing a DMARC record with a reject policy caused a lot of mail to bounce, but none of that was because that user (or that mailing list) was sending spam. Most cable companies prohibit customers from running mail servers on their cable connection and mail from those companies is widely rejected, but that doesn’t mean the mail is spam.
Sometimes a block is because some of the mail is being sent to people who didn’t ask for it or are complaining about it. This doesn’t make the sender a bad person. It doesn’t make the sending company bad. It just means that there is some issue with a part of the marketing program that need to be addressed.
The biggest problem I see is some senders get so invested in convincing receivers, delivery experts and filtering companies that they’re not spammers, that they miss actually fixing the problem. They are so worried that someone might think they’re spammers, they don’t actually listen to what’s being said by the blocking organization, or by their ISP or by their ESP.
Calling email spam isn’t a moral judgement. But, if too many people call a particular email spam, it’s going to be challenging to get that mail to the inbox. Instead of arguing with those people, and the filters that listen to them, a better use of time and energy is fixing the reasons people aren’t liking your email.

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