Recent Posts

What happens when you apply for a PayDay loan

From NPR.
I’ve had clients over the years who were email marketing agencies selling leads to lenders. Their delivery is horrible, even when they’re doing all the “right things” for email. I’ve come to the conclusion that PayDay lenders are a lot like lawyers: “95% of them give the rest a bad name.”
PayDay loans are the one area where content trumps everything else, and so much of the content out there is bad, it can ruin delivery for everything. The NPR article speaks to why that is.

Eggs, ham, sausage and spam.
Some say the Internet is for porn; but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam. As communication technologies got cheaper, the cost of grabbing a megaphone and jamming it up against the aching ear-drums of an advertising-jaded public collapsed: Meanwhile, the content-is-king mantra of the monetization mavens gridlocked the new media in an advertising-supported business model. The great and the good of the Academy have been fighting a losing battle against the Anglo-Saxon hucksterization model for the past thirty years: But the sad truth is that the battle’s lost. The tide of war was turned in Beijing and New Delhi, when the rapidly industrializing new superpowers climbed on the MAKE MONEY FAST band-wagon and gave free reign to the free market, red in tooth and claw – just as long as the sharp bits were directed outwards. And today the entire world is still drowning in a sea of attention-grabbing unregulated unethical untruthful spamvertising.
Spam, ham, sausage and spam.
Rule 34, Charles Stross
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Looking for message labs help?

There’s a common bounce error from the Message Labs’ filtering appliance that goes no where.

Getting spamcop summary reports

1) Create a spamcop account at http://www.spamcop.net/w3m?action=ispsignupform, once you get your password mailed to you, login to the account.
2) Request reports by clicking on “request reports” http://www.spamcop.net/mcgi?action=reqroute. Spamcop takes most formats of IP addresses that people normally use.
3) Reports will come in aggregate and look like:

Tor cleans up their lists

Recently I got an email from Tor. Apparently they’re watching their opens and clicks and they noticed I hadn’t loaded any images recently.

This month in email: October 2013

What did we talk about in October? Let’s take a look back over this month.

Changes at Spamcop

Earlier this week some ESPs started asking if other ESPs have seen an uptick in Spamcop listings. The overwhelming answer (9 of 11 ESP representatives) said yes. I’ve also had clients start to ask me about Spamcop listings. All in all, there seems to be some changes at Spamcop that means more senders are showing up on the Spamcop radar.
Luckily, Spamcop provides us some insight into their data processing. If you look at the current monthly volume graph, we can see some very interesting changes in data.

The DMA responds

Stephanie Miller has posted over on the DMA blog explaining just what went down with the mailing that got the DMA SBLed over the weekend.
Ken Magill has a pair of articles about the email from the DMA. Oops: DMA spams Spamhaus and others and What we can learn from the DMA.

Posts and articles about the DMA spamming

The DMA kicks spam up a notch
The DMA: Spamming Job Services to a Purchased List
The DMA Spams A Bunch of Anti-spammers
The DMA sends e-mail that’s memorable, but not in a good way

What not to do when buying lists

Saturday morning I check my mail and notice multiple emails from the DMA. Yes, I got three copies of an email from the US Direct Marketing Association with the subject line Kick It Up A Notch With The DMA Career Center. It seems the DMA are buying addresses from various companies. Because I use tagged email addresses, this means their naive de-duping doesn’t realize that laura-x and laura-y are the same email address. Of course, they’ve also managed to send to an untagged email address, too. I have no idea where they got that particular address; I’m sure I’ve never handed that address over to the DMA for any reason.
Saturday afternoon, I check one of the professional filtering / anti-spam mailing list. Some subscribers are asking for copies of spam from 97.107.23.191 to .194. They’d seen a lot of mail to non-existent email addresses from that range and were looking to see what was going on and who was sending such bad mail. Multiple people on the list popped up with examples of the DMA mail.
Sunday morning, I checked the discussions wherein I discovered the DMA was added to the SBL (SBL 202218, SBL 202217, SBL 202216). It seems not only did they hit over a hundred Spamhaus spamtraps, they spammed Steve Linford himself.