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March 6, 2017

Large companies (un?)knowingly hire spammers

By laura

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06March

This morning, CSO and MacKeeper published joint articles on a massive data leak from a marketing company. (Update: 2019: both articles are gone, a cached version of the CSOnline link is at )  This company, River City Media (RCM), failed to put a password on their online backups sometime. This leaked all of the company’s data out to the Internet at large. MacKeeper Security Researcher, Chris...

March 3, 2017

February 2017: The Month In Email

By laura

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03March

Happy March! As always, I blogged about best practices with subscriptions, and shared a great example of subscription transparency that I received from The Guardian. I also wrote about what happens to the small pool of people who fail to complete a confirmed opt-in (or double opt-in) subscription process. While there are many reasons that someone might not complete that process, ultimately that...

March 2, 2017

End of an era

By laura

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02March

A few moments ago, I cancelled one of my email addresses. This is an address that has been mine since somewhere around 1993 or 4. It was old enough to vote. And now it’s no more. I am not even sure why I kept it for so long. It was my dialup account back when I was in grad school in Delaware. When I moved to Madison to work at the university, I kept it as a shell account and email address...

February 28, 2017

Confirmed Opt-In: An Old Topic Resurrected

By laura

4 Min read

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28February

Looking back through my archives it’s been about 4 years or so since I wrote about confirmed opt in. The last post was how COI wasn’t important, but making sure you were reaching the right person was important. Of course, I’ve also written about confirmed opt-in in general and how it was a tool somewhat akin to a sledgehammer. I’m inspired to write about it today because...

February 27, 2017

Policy is hard

By laura

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27February

We’re back at work after a trip to M3AAWG. This conference was a little different for me than previous ones. I spent a lot of time just talking with people – about email, about abuse, about the industry, about the ecosystem. Sometimes when you’re in a position like mine, you get focused way too much on the trees. Of course, it’s the focusing on the trees that makes me good...

February 23, 2017

Naming Names

By laura

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23February

One of the things that regularly happens at email conferences is a bunch of representatives from various ISPs and sometimes deliverability companies get up on stage and entertain questions from the audience about how to get email to the inbox. I’ve sat in many of these sessions – on both sides of the stage. The questions are completely predictable. Almost invariably, someone asks if...

February 21, 2017

Network Abuse

By laura

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21February

Many years ago, back when huge levels of spam involved hundreds of thousands of emails, there was a group of people who spent a lot of time talking about what to do about abuse. One of the distinctions we made was abuse of the net as opposed to abuse on the net. We were looking at abuse of the network, that is activity that made the internet less useable. At the time abuse of the network was...

February 20, 2017

It's that time of year again!

By laura

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20February

That time of year when my friends and colleagues join the annual migration to San Francisco for 3 days and 4 nights of messaging, mobile, malware, and midnight meetings. We’re headed up to the conference later today. Do stop by and say hi!

February 17, 2017

Why so many IP addresses?

By steve

8 Min read

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17February

Hi Laura, Merry Xmas and wishing you a Happy New Year! I recently looked at a popular ESP’s IPv4 space and I was astounded. How does an ESP get an IP allocation of 20,480 IPs? ARIN guidelines do not allow “MX/Mailing” IPs to count towards a valid justification especially in the case when each and every IP is being used for this purpose. That’s 80 /24’s…and at a time when we are out of IPv4 space…...

February 16, 2017

From the archives: Taking Permission

By laura

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16February

From February 2010, Taking Permission. Permission is always a hot topic in email marketing. Permission is key! the experts tell us. Get permission to send email! the ISPs tell us. Marketers have responded by setting up processes to “get” permission from recipients before adding them to mailing lists. They point to their privacy polices and signup forms and say “Look! the recipient gave us...