Recent Posts

Listen to me talk about filtering, blocklists and delivery

I did an interview with Practical eCommerce a few weeks ago. The podcast and transcript are now available.
I want to thank Kerry and the rest of the staff there for the opportunity to talk email and filtering with their readers.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone in the US.

We lie more in email than in person

People are more prone to lie over email than face to face.

Having the same conversation

This morning I was reading a blog post about the failure of the congressional super committee. The author commented

Email lost a mighty advocate

Last night J.D. Falk passed away from stomach cancer. For those of us who were privileged to know him, it was not unexpected but it is still a sad day.
CircleID has a memorial post up.
I’ve known of JD since I started in email in the late ’90s. I had the privilege of meeting him when we moved out to the bay area and he invited Steve and I to the “sushi cabal” – a biweekly get together. We then worked together at MAPS for a short time.
JD will be missed.
ETA: I’ll be adding links as I find them.
JD’s official memorial page: http://jdfalkmemorial.org/
Neil’s tribute: http://www.welikeballs.com/2011/11/jd-falk-bad-pictures-of-good-food.html
MAAWG memorial page: http://www.maawg.org/page/memorial-jd-falk
CAUCE memorial page: http://www.cauce.org/2011/11/jdfalk.html
The IETF expedites publishing of the RFC JD authored: http://www.virusbtn.com/news/2011/11_17.xml. Many thanks to the staff that made this happen. I am assured that JD was told of the publishing before he passed.
Return Path’s memorial. http://www.returnpath.net/blog/received/2011/11/remembering-j-d/
Tami Forman’s post. http://tamimforman.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/j-d-falk/

IP reputation and the bulk folder

I’ve spent much of today talking to various people about IP reputation and bulk foldering. It’s an interesting topic, and one that has changed quite a bit in the past few months. Here are a few of the things I said on the topic.
Generally IPs that the ISP has not seen traffic from before starts out with a slight negative reputation. If you think about all the new IPs that an ISP will see mail from on a daily basis, 99 out of 100 of those will be bot infected windows boxes. So they’re going to treat that mail very suspiciously. And, in the grand scheme of things, that mail is going to be spam a lot more than it’s not going to be spam.
Some ISPs put mail in the inbox and bulk foldering during the whitelisting process. Basically they’re looking to see if your recipients care enough about your mail to look for it in the bulk folder. This then feeds back to create the reputation of the IP address. There is another fairly major ISP that told me that when they’re seeing erratic data for an particular sender they will put some mail in bulk and some mail in the inbox and let the recipients tell the system which is more correct.
That’s what happens while you’re establishing a reputation on an IP. Once there is some history on the IP, things get a little different. At that point, IP reputation becomes unimportant in terms of bulk foldering. The ISP knows an IP has a certain level of reputation, and *all* their mail has that level of reputation. So bulk foldering is more related to content and reputation of the domains and URLs in the message.
The other reason IP reputation isn’t trumping domain / content reputation as much as it did in the past is that spammers stomped all over that. Affiliates, snowshoers, botnets, all those methods of sending spam made IP reputation less important and the ISPs had to find new ways to determine spam / not spam.
So if you’re seeing a lot of bulk foldering of mail, it’s unlikely there’s anything IP reputation based to do. Instead of worrying about IP reputation, focus instead on the content of the mail and see what you may need to do to improve the reputation of the domains and URLs (or landing pages) in the emails. While the content may not appear that different, the mere mention of “domain.com” where domain.com is seen in a lot of spam can trigger bulking.

Vetting customers

MAAWG has published a BCP for vetting new customers. This is the culmination of much work by a lot of people.
One of the best things about the document is the discussion of how spammers attempt to hide their identity. All too often I’ve been called in by ESPs to help them identify how a spammer got on their network and where their process failed. As filtering gets better at blocking spam, spammers are spending more and more time trying to steal good reputations to get their unwanted mail through.
Providers who follow these rules may still find themselves with spammers as customers, but the spammers will have to work harder to get on clean networks.

Spam is not illegal

I was recently taken to task for claiming that unsolicited bulk email was spam.

Silly Saturday Spam

I couldn’t resist posting the newest Nigerian 419 showing up in my mailbox.

Eleven – Eleven – Eleven

I’ve been hearing a lot of people wondering how many marketers were taking advantage of the “special” date today. I got two, and both managed to work in the number 11 into the offer. One offered 11 of their top selling products for $11 each. The other offered a fixed amount off a purchase, if you used the code “eleven” at checkout. And that particular offer expires at 11:11.
What other offers did people get?