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What is a dot-zero listing?

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Some email blacklists focus solely on allowing their users to block mail from problematic sources. Others aim to reduce the amount of bad mail sent and prefer senders clean up their practices, rather than just blocking them wholesale. The Spamhaus SBL is one of the second type, using listings both to block mail permanently from irredeemable spammers and as short term encouragement for a sender to fix their practices.
All a blacklists infrastructure – and the infrastructure of related companies, such as reputation monitoring services – is based on identifying senders by their IP addresses and recording their misbehaviour as records associated with those IP addresses. For example, one test entry for the SBL is the IP address 192.203.178.107, and the associated record is SBL230. Because of that they tend not to have a good way to deal with entities that aren’t associated with an IP address range.
Sometimes a blacklist operator would like put a sender on notice that the mail they’re emitting is a problem, and that they should take steps to fix that, but they don’t want to actually block that senders mail immediately. How to do that, within the constraints of the IP address based blacklist infrastructure?
IP addresses are assigned to users in contiguous blocks and there’s always a few wasted, as you can’t use the first or last addresses in that range (for technical / historical reasons). Our main network consists of 128 IP addresses, 184.105.179.128 to 184.105.179.255, but we can’t put servers on 184.105.179.128 (as it’s our router) or 184.105.179.255 (as it’s the “broadcast address” for our subnet).
So if Spamhaus wanted to warn us that we were in danger of having our mail blocked, they could fire a shot across our bow without risk of blocking any mail right now by listing the first address in our subnet – 184.105.179.128 – knowing that we don’t have a server running on that address.
For any organization with more than 128 IP addresses – which includes pretty much all ISPs and ESPs – IP addresses are assigned such that the first IP address in the range ends in a zero, so that warning listing will be for an address “x.y.z.0” – it’s a dot-zero listing.

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CAN SPAM ruling against whois privacy protection

A number of bloggers (Venkat B., John L. and Rebecca T.) have mentioned ZooBuh, Inc. v. Better Broadcasting, LLC (No.: 2:11cv00516-DN (D. Utah May 31, 2013)) recently.
In summary of the case is that ZooBuh is an ISP that has sued Better Broadcasting for spamming in violation of CAN SPAM. Their case hinged on the receipt of more than 12,000 emails from Better Broadcasting, LLC. ZooBuh said these emails caused the following harm

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DMARC: Please Be Careful!

(Cross posted from Spam Resource.)
Every couple of days, somebody new pops up on the DMARC-Discuss mailing list to ask some question or share an observation. It’s great to see people interested and joining the conversation. Clearly, DMARC interest and adoption are growing. What’s really frustrating, though, is that for about a quarter of the new subscribers, their first mailing list message goes to the spam folder in my Gmail account. It has become sort of an intelligence test I apply to new subscribers — I’ve stopped digging those messages out of the spam folder. I’m figuring that if they can’t figure out how to implement a DMARC record, or they don’t understand that it’s not really compatible with mailing lists nor is it meant for hobbyist domains, then I think perhaps they’ve got some things they’ve got to figure out before they’re ready to join the discussion.
To that end, let me take a moment to jot down some recommendations for folks who are considering implementing DMARC.

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Just… make it stop

It used to be when I’d send in a complaint to an ESP, I’d want them to take it seriously. To actually fix their customer problems. To stop their customers from spamming. To fix the broken process that resulted in their customer thinking I asked for email.
These days? These days I just want the ESP to suppress my address and make the mail stop. Even better would be suppressing the address from their entire customer base – the only addresses I send in complaints for these days are traps.
Sadly, there are ESPs out there that can’t manage to stop customers from spamming people who have reported the spam. But, I am forever the optimist and keep sending the complaints when I think someone will care.

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Handling SNDS requests

I’ve been working with a new client on getting them signed up for FBLs, whitelists and other sorts of monitoring. One of the places I recommended to them was signing up for the Hotmail Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) program. It’s been a while since I’ve gone through the process, so I decided to sign up our network space to give up to date instructions from to clients.
As part of the process, Microsoft confirms the request with the network owner. This is smart, it prevents the wrong people from getting access to delivery data. They use public records (ARIN and IP Whois data) to figure out the “network owner” and send an email to that person. In my case, the mail was sent to a role account at Hurricane Electric (he.net).
I asked for access, filling in “this is Laura from Word to the Wise and I am looking for access to our space.” The email address in the request was my @hotmail.com address. A few minutes later I checked my inbox to find an email from he.net.

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About the @ sign

The @ sign is ubiquitous online. We use it and we don’t think about it. But the history of the @ sign is more complicated than we realize.

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URIBL having a bad day

Multiple lists have been discussing DNS failures for URIBL.com over the last few hours. This is causing some serious mail problems for folks, both on the inbound and the outbound.
URIBL has a note on their home page (which is unreachable for some folks).

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Salesforce buying Exacttarget

Reports today say that Salesforce is buying Exacttarget for around 2.5 billion dollars.

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TWSD: avoid filters

I was cleaning out one of my spamtraps. This is the one that gets a ton of “legitimate” spam. In the last 12 hours it’s gotten spam advertising: T.G.I.Fridays, KFC, Applebees, LendingTree, Lasix Vision Institute, Khols, Burger King, Match.com, and Vistaprint.
The footer of some of the mails are making me laugh, though. It’s clear they’re trying to comply with CAN SPAM, but are having problems with content filtering. Here’s a brief selection of the footers:
Ondemand Research, 1O5 E.[34th]-Street Ste 144, New Y0rk, NY 1OO16
Ondemand Research, 105 E. 34th Street St #144, New York, NY 10016
0ndemand=Research, 1O5/E/./34th Street Ste 144,New Y0rk,NY=1OO16
Poor OnDemand Research, they just can’t catch a break.
EDIT: Just got a spam for Ruby Tuesday’s using a .pw domain.

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Gmail's new inbox tabs. News at 11.

Yesterday Gmail announced a change to their UI. This new UI lets users configure tabs in their inbox for different sorts of email. This change has greatly upset some marketers. Yesterday I heard it described as war on marketers, as a conspiracy to stop all email marketing and as a horrible injustice to legitimate marketers. I even saw a few people call for an organized boycott of Google AdWords.
While I do appreciate many of us don’t like change, I can’t quite jump on the histrionic bandwagon. This change isn’t Google declaring war on marketers. Google is, at the end of the day, a marketing company. They live and die by marketing dollars. And before you ask, I don’t really think email marketers can organize a boycott that actually has any real impact on Google’s bottom line and causes them to change their interface.
There are a lot of reasons I don’t think this is the actual end of the world and that marketers should just take a deep breath and chill.
The tabbed interface is really just Priority Inbox v. 2. Priority inbox was rolled out a few years ago and there was quite a bit of noise about how that was going to make email marketing more difficult. While getting email to the inbox at Gmail is a challenge for many marketers, I don’t think Priority Inbox is the underlying reason. I think Gmail has gotten a lot stricter on filters, particularly content filters thus making it harder for borderline mail to get to the inbox instead of the bulk folder.
The tabbed interface is just another way of organizing mail in the inbox. Mail is not moved to any different folders, it’s still in the inbox. Users can enable or disable the settings as they desire and all of the mail stays in their inbox.
New Gmail Tab configuration The interface is not on by default. Users have to actually go in and turn on the setting. For users who don’t set up filters anyway, it’s unlikely they’re going to take advantage of the tabs. I did take a look at the configuration settings. Gmail tries to make it clear what kinds of mails will end up in what tabs by telling you what From: addresses currently in your inbox will end up in a tab if you enable it.
Overall, I don’t think this is really going to cause horrible repercussions to email marketers. In fact, this does seem to offer some benefit to email marketers that use consistent branding. According to Mickey Chandler at Exacttarget, the interface “not only display[s] the number of new emails in the tab, but [also displays the] names of the brands whose mails are in that tab.” This is a good thing for marketers, who now have the chance to get their name in the inbox interface.
One thing I did notice, too, was that when I enabled tabs, Gmail presented me with more advertising in the “promotions” tab and provided no advertising in any other tabs.

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