ArchiveNovember 2017

Permission and B2B spam

Two of the very first posts I wrote on the blog were about permission (part 1, part 2). Re-reading those posts is interesting. Experience has taught me that recipients are much more forgiving of implicit opt-in than that post implies. The chance in recipient expectations doesn’t mean, however, that permission isn’t important or required. In fact, The Verge reported on a chatbot that...

Today is one of those days I just want to argue with all the subject headers of the marketing email I get.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) November 10, 2017

Subscription bombing and abuse prevention

A few weeks ago ProPublica was the victim of a subscription bomb attack. Julia Angwin found my blog post on the subject and contacted me to talk about the post. We spent an hour or so on the phone and I shared some of the information we had on the problem. Julie told me she was interested in investigating this further problem further. Today, ProPublica published Cheap Tricks: the Low Cost of...

Interacting in professional fora

There are a bunch of online communities – mailing lists, Slack channels, etc. – where “people who do email” interact. Some of them are open to anyone to subscribe, some of them are semi-private and require an invitation, others are closed and only available by invitation and yet others are associated with trade associations and only open to their members. Many of them...

Proofpoint acquires Cloudmark

Major industry news today as Proofpoint and Cloudmark announced a major acquisition deal. Proofpoint agreed to pay $110 million in cash to acquire Cloudmark. Prior to this acquisition, Proofpoint focused on business filters. Cloudmark’s focus was selling into large ISPs, including large cable providers, and mobile carriers. Proofpoint assured investors they will continue to supporting and...

October 2017: The Month in Email

October was a busy month. In addition to on boarding multiple new clients, we got new desks, I went to Toronto to see M3AAWG colleagues for a few days, and had oral surgery. Happily, we’re finally getting closer to having the full office setup.  What is an office without a Grover Cat? (he was so pleased he figured out how to get onto it at standing height). All of this means that blogging...

The Blighty Flag

Back in the dark ages (the late ’90s) most people used dialup to connect to the internet. Those people who had broadband could run all sorts of services off them, including websites and mail servers and such. We had a cable modem for a while handling mail for blighty.com. At that time blighty.com had an actual website. This site hosted some of the very first online tools for fighting abuse...

Gmail survey rough analysis

I closed the Google Postmaster Tools (GPT) survey earlier today. I received 160 responses, mostly from the link published here on the blog and in the M3AAWG Senders group. I’ll be putting a full analysis together over the next couple weeks, but thought I’d give everyone a quick preview / data dump based on the analysis and graphs SurveyMonkey makes available in their analysis. Of 160...

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