Looking back, looking forward

Six years ago today I wrote here “Spam isn’t going away“, talking about systemic problems at Google, Cloudflare and Amazon and in India.

If I were writing it today I might mention Microsoft, Salesforce and ExactTarget as well as Google, and might stress Amazon less (mostly because all the Amazon spam sites tend to be hidden behind Cloudflare, so you don’t know they’re Amazon sites). And OVH, of course.

But the gist of the story hasn’t changed in six years, and the conclusion is as valid today as it was then:

There will be increasing volumes of B2B spam being sent for the foreseeable future, and there doesn’t seem to be much we can do to change that.

If your career involves filtering inbound spam – consumer, smb or enterprise – it seems your skills will be in demand for a long while yet.

Related Posts

B2B mail and compliance failures

This morning I got an email to a tagged address. The tag matched the company so it’s very likely I did actually sign up. Digging back through my mailbox, I see one previous email to that account – back in 2008.

Read More

Filters working as intended

One of the toughest deliverability problems to deal with is when mail is blocked or going to spam because the filters are working as intended. Often the underlying issue is a lack of permission.

Read More

Not fooling anyone…

A question came up on the Women of Email Facebook page about sending cold B2B emails. This is one of those areas I have strong opinions about, mostly because I am so tired of getting deceptive and unending messages from folks.
Realistically, cold emailing isn’t going to stop just because recipients hate receiving it. We haven’t wiped out spam in 20+ years, we’re not going to manage it for this one tiny piece. But I do think there are things senders can do to minimize the amount of frustration their spam creates.

Read More