The 10 worst …

Spamhaus gave a bunch of us a preview of their new “Top 10 worst” (or should that be bottom 10?) lists at M3AAWG. These lists have now been released to the public.
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The categories they’re measuring are:

Nothing really surprising there, but it’s nice to see the numbers.
I have to wonder if the listing of the top 10 spammers will change the minds of some of the anti-CASL folks. To listen to them all the “real” spammers are criminals hiding over seas. But, according to Spamhaus, 6 of the top 10 spammers are in the US and two of the others are in Canada (albeit with Russian influence). Only two of the top 10 spammers are outside North America.
The other thing that surprised me about the top 10 spammers is that I recognize some of the names from names clients have mentioned to me as legitimate marketing partners and affiliates. These hard core spammers, some of the worst in the world, convince real companies to pay them money to send mail. It’s great for the spammers, they get paid whether or not mail is delivered. In my experience, though, it’s not so great for their customers though. Customers frequently end up dealing with major delivery problems, even for the mail the send directly.
Another thing worth discussing is the list of TLDs. This is TLDs that have the highest ratio of spam domains compared to the total number of domains in the TLD, it’s not a list of TLDs with the most spam domains. I expect that award goes to .com. I do expect this to be a volatile list. Spammers are, at heart, cheap con artists. While they will spend money to try and get their mail through, they’ll also try to find a deal when they can. As TLDs run sales and offer incentives, they’re going to attract more spammers.
I have heard some folks managing the filters saying that the new and non-standard TLDs are treated as guilty until proven innocent. I think until the TLD owners figure out they need to actually pay attention to abuse it’s best to stick with the mainstream TLDs.

SPF: The rule of ten
The Internet is hard.

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Dealing with blocklists, deliverability and abuse people

There are a lot of things all of us in the deliverability, abuse and blocklist space have heard, over and over and over again. They’re so common they’re running jokes in the industry. These phrases are used by spammers, but a lot of non-spammers seem to use them as well.
The most famous is probably “I’m sure they’ll unblock me if I can just explain my business model.” Trust me, the folks blocking your mail don’t want to hear about your business model. They just want you to stop doing whatever it is you’re doing. In fact, I’m one of the few people in the space who actually wants to hear about your business model – so I can help you reach your goals without doing things that get you blocked.
A few months ago, after getting off yet another phone call where I talked clients down from explaining their business model to Spamhaus, I put together list of phrases that senders really shouldn’t use when talking to their ESP, a blocklist provider or an abuse desk. I posted it to a closed list and one of the participants put it together into a bingo card.
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A lot of these statements are valid marketing and business statements. But the folks responsible for blocking mail don’t really care. They just want their users to be happy with the mail they receive.

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The dark side of email marketing

Everyone I talk to when dealing with issues inevitably has to tell me they are legitimate email marketers. They’re not spammers, they’re just business people. I often find it difficult to fathom why they need to tell me this. It’s not like email marketers are criminals or anything.
Two recent stories reminded me how evil some folks are. While I’ve not had any direct contact (that I know of) with any of the players on this end of things I have zero doubt that if they called me they would tell me that they were legitimate email marketers.
In one case, a members of a spam gang kidnapped the teenage daughter of someone investigating their activities. The gang held her for more than 5 years in horrific conditions. Yesterday Joseph Menn, author of “Fatal System Error” posted on Boing Boing that his friend got his daughter back. It is a heartbreaking story and incredibly sobering.
In another case, the Russian police arrested a man who ran spammit.com, a clearinghouse for viagra sellers to find spammers to send their mail. Reports say that mail volumes dropped by a fifth after the site was taken offline.
There is real evil in the email marketing industry. Sure, they’re spammers and we can all stand up and say they’re not legitimate. But, this is what the ISPs and Spamhaus and law enforcement are dealing with on a regular basis.

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Things you need to read: 2/5/16

gearheadAsk the Expert: How Can Email Marketers Stay Out of Gmail Jail and in the Inbox? The expert in question is an old friend of mine, Andrew Barrett. I met Andrew online in the late 90s, and we worked together (briefly) at MAPS. He was out of email for a while, but I’m pleased he came back to share his talents with us. The information in the article is valuable for anyone who struggles with getting to the Gmail inbox.
Unclutter Your Inbox, Archive & Keep Your Messages. Shiv Shankar talks about some new features at Yahoo Mail. With a simple click, you can archive email so it’s available to search, but not cluttering up your inbox. One of the things that jumped out at me from that article is that Yahoo is providing 1 TB of storage. That’s more than Google!
The EEC is doing a survey on the impact of CASL and want to hear from marketers. Go check out their blog post and take their survey.
Sparkpost has a guest blog from Alex Garcia-Tobar, co-founder of Valimail about common DKIM failures. I’ve met Alex a few times and I’ve always found him a pleasure to talk to. Alex is somewhat new in the email space, but he really gets some of the challenges in the authentication space. A lot of the issues he mentions in that blog post like lack of key rotation and shared keys are some of the technical debt I was talking about in my predictions for 2016 post.
What links have you read this week that are worth sharing?

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