I’ve been increasingly annoyed by these drip automation campaigns. You know the ones I mean. Senders use some software to find some flimsy pretext to send a mail. Then there emails drop every few days. Sometimes this cycle goes on for months. Most of these messages violate CAN SPAM. It’s annoying. It’s illegal. It is spam. I can even opt out of most of these messages, they...
AOL were kind enough to share some details about the shutdown of the Verizon mail system and the migration of @verizon.net email address to the AOL mail service: What is the cut-over date for the verizon.net MX record? The cut-over date for the mx record for verizon.net to to be handled by AOL is June 20, 2017. This will occur after midnight sometime on Tuesday morning June 20 EDT. How...
Today the Canadian Government announced they were suspending the provision that allows individuals to sue marketers for violations of CASL. Under these provisions, individual Canadian consumers had a private right of action. Any Canadian could sue any company that sent mail violating the law. This part of the law upset many senders and marketers. I’m sure many are relieved at this delay in...
A little over a year ago, Kristin Bond posted an article (reprinted here) looking at the diversity of speakers at marketing conferences. As with many articles pointing out gender issues in technology there was quite a bit of discussion about it on a related mailing list. Some of the comments were supportive and open to the idea that gender diversity is an overall good. Some of the comments...
On May 31, British broadband provider EE discontinued service for a number of email domains: Orange.net, Orangehome.co.uk, Wanadoo.co.uk, Freeserve.co.uk, Fsbusiness.co.uk, Fslife.co.uk, Fsmail.net, Fsworld.co.uk, and Fsnet.co.uk. These domains were acquired by EE as part of multiple mergers and acquisitions. On their help page, EE explains that the proliferation of free email services with...
A few months ago a colleague sent me, and every other person on his overly large LinkedIn list, an email looking for some help hiring. It starts off with “Greetings LinkedI Connections” and ends with… an unsubscribe link. P.S. If you don’t want to hear from me, here’s an unsubscribe link – that’s the easiest way. My LinkedIn network has gotten so...
Spamhaus has listed a number of domains belonging to French politicians recently. In their blog post about it, they mention that the listings are directly related to address lists provided to candidates by the French government. We learned of this issue recently when two different French candidates became entangled in two of our automated spam detection systems, the DBL and the CSS. The...
It’s easy to tell if a domain is using SPF – look up the TXT record for the domain and see if any of them begin with “v=spf1”. If one does, they’re using SPF. If none do, they’re not. (If more than one does? They’re publishing invalid SPF.) AOL are publishing SPF. Geocities aren’t. For DKIM it’s harder, as a DKIM key isn’t published at a...
I recently received a 419 spam that had a message at the top of the email. Yup, a 419 spammer is trying to convince me there are millions of dollars waiting for me, but he won’t pay his software vendor 29.99 to comply with a license. This is only the most recent in a long line of examples of spammers being cheap and attempting to steal services. Back when I was working abuse almost every...
When you link to an external resource – an image, a javascript file, some css style – from a web page you do so with a URL, usually something like “; or “;. The world is beginning to go all https, all the time, but until recently good practice was to make a web page available via both http and https. The problem is that if you try and load a resource from an http URL from...
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