Spamhaus wrote about the return of open relays yesterday. What they’re seeing today matches what I see: there is fairly consistent abuse of open relays to send spam. As spam problems go it’s not as serious as compromised machines or abuse-tolerant ESPs / ISPs/ freemail providers – either in terms of volume or user inbox experience – but it’s definitely part of the...
SBCGlobal having a bad day
I’m seeing scattered reports of the SBCGlobal.net MTAs refusing connections. No current information about fixes.
Downdector.com is also showing problems with Yahoo mail as of around 3PM eastern.
Private whois records hide spammers and help bring down a registrar
I’ve talked in the past about how many spam filters, ISPs and blocklists treat domains that are registered behind privacy protection. I’ve written about how many commercial domains behind privacy protection are used for fraud. I’ve written about multiple legal cases where the courts ruled against companies using privacy protected domains in email. I’ve even gone so far as...
Do Gmail tabs hurt email marketing?
Earlier this year, Gmail rolled out a new way for users to organize their inbox: tabs. Tabs were an attempt by Gmail to help Gmail users organize their mail, particularly programmatically generated email like social media alerts and marketing mail. While many of us took a wait and see approach, a number of email marketers took this as one of the 7 signs of the apocalypse and the end of email...
Hotmail having a bad day
Looks like Hotmail / Microsoft is having a rather bad day. Their DNS seems to be intermittent. While they were down a while ago they were returning SERVFAIL for some DNS lookups, including MX lookups. For senders who have the DNS data in their recursive resolvers, this will have no impact. For senders who either don’t have the data cached or who have the data expire before the servers come...
Holiday mailing advice from mailbox providers
Christine Borgia has a post on the Return Path blog where she interviews a number of different groups (spamfilters, DNSBLs, mailbox providers) about their filtering strategy for the holidays. Overall, no one changes their filtering during the Holiday Mailing Season. On the other hand, many marketers do change their marketing strategies in ways that trigger more filtering and blocking. The take...
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...
Don't unsubscribe from spam!!
Having been around the email and anti-spam industry for a while, I’ve just about seen and heard it all. In fact, sometimes I’ve been around for the beginning of the myth. One myth that seems to never actually go away is “unsubscribing just confirms you’re a real address and your address will get sold and your spam load will explode.” This is related but orthogonal to...
Feel good Friday
I’ve told myself I can’t stop working until I post. Sadly, I can’t think anything useful to post. It’s been one of those weeks where I had some tricky and complicated client issues to work through. I can think of a lot of things to say, but I don’t want co compromise any client information. I wouldn’t do it on purpose, but I am very careful not to...
Can someone explain to me…
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