There seemed to be a surge of email marketing trumpting Cyber Monday Sales in big, glossy lettering in the week before Cyber Monday – so much so that I was bored of the whole thing long before the sales actually started. I wondered whether there actually was a big increase in volume of mail, or whether it was just louder, pushier and more noticeable. So I went through my inbox and...
I use a pretty standard mail filtering setup – a fairly vanilla SpamAssassin setup on the front end, combined with naive bayesian content filters in my mail client. So I don’t reject any mail, it just ends up in one of my inboxes or a junk folder. And I have a mix of normal consumer mail – facebook, twitter, lots of commercial newsletters, mail from friends and colleagues and...
There are lots of terribly complicated rules in email marketing and retention. “Only send email to people who opted-in”, “Never use a pink background”[1], “Have a working unsubscription link”, “Don’t put FREE in the subject line”[1]. Another one should be “How does what you’re doing look to a typical recipient?”. I’ve...
Most of the time when you’re sending bulk email you’re sending to a fairly anonymous list of email addresses. If you’re a good email marketer you’ve got a fairly good idea of their demographics, where the email addresses came from and maybe that they’ve purchased things from you in the past. But they’re still strangers – a “pre-existing business...
This was posted to the IETF DKIM Working Group mailing list this morning: The dkim working group has completed its primary charter items, and is officially closing. The mailing list will be retained for future discussions involving dkim. The list archive will also be retained. The dkim working group was primarily focused on DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Signatures and DomainKeys Identified...
There’s a lot of variation in how ESPs respond to a report of one of their customers sending spam. Almost all ESPs will suppress future email to the recipient. Most will also note that there was a complaint about the sender, and use a count of those complaints for reporting, triage and escalation of problems. Beyond that, though, there’s little consistency. I sent a spam report to...
I’m doing testing on a new release of Abacus at the moment, so I’m in a software QA (Quality Assurance) frame of mind. One of the tenets of software QA is “Assume users are malicious”. That’s also one of the tenets of security engineering, but in a completely different way. A security engineer treats users as malicious, as the users he or she is most concerned about...
Over the last year or so we’ve been hearing some concerns about some of the blacklisting policies and decisions at Trend Micro / MAPS. One common thread is that the ESP customers being listed aren’t the sort of sender who you’d expect to be a significant source of abuse. Real companies, gathering addresses from signup forms on their website. Not spammers who buy lists, or who...
There are a several approaches to authenticating email, and the different authentication methods have a lot of different settings to choose from (sometimes because they’re useful, other times just because they were designed by committee). It’s nice that they have that flexibility for the complex situations that might benefit from them, but almost all the time you just want to choose a...
Providing tagged email addresses to vendors is fascinating, and at the same time disturbing. It lets me track what a particular email address is used for, but also to see where and when they’ve leaked to spammers. I’d really like to know who leaked an email address, and when. All my inbound mail is sorted into “spam” and “not-spam” by a combination of...
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