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Whois privacy protection

I’ve talked about using privacy protection on domains in the past (here, here, here, here, and here). Short version (if you don’t want to check all the old links) is that privacy protection for commercial domains is bad, that’s what spammers do and legitimate email marketers should not hide domains behind privacy protection services. I still believe all of these things. What...

Filtering more than spam

The obvious application of machine learning for email is to send spam to the junk/bulk folder. Most services use some level of machine learning for filters. Places like Gmail have extensive machine learning filters to filter spam and unwanted mail away from their users. Some organizations are taking the filtering process a step further. Almost every mail client more advanced than PINE has the...

Testing your opt-out process

When was the last time you tested your opt-out process? Did you just click the unsubscribe link to see if the page loaded? How did you confirm the email address was unsubscribed? If you have a Gmail account, Gmail allows you to use unlimited aliases. For example, if your Gmail email address is josh@gmail.com, you can add the + symbol to your email address to create an alias. An example of an...

On Father's Day

I’m on quite a few mailing lists for companies whose main product is sending gifts: food hampers, jewelry, flowers, overpriced desk toys and so on. They tend to ramp up their volume before appropriate holidays such as Christmas, Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day or Father’s Day and target their promotions to those particular holidays. One recipient may have a...

Google Apps for ISPs is gone

Google Apps for ISPs is being shut down. While this was a scheduled end of life, apparently some users weren’t notified (always keep the contact email address up to date at your vendor!) and other users were told that it would be discontinued in July and were surprised when their service was turned off a month earlier than they expected. I’ve not seen any reports of mail bouncing due...

Yahoo Feedback Loop

If you are utilizing the Yahoo Complaint Feedback Loop, you should have received an email today about an upcoming change to the CFL. The message received was: “On June 29, 2015, we will transition Yahoo Complaint Feedback Loop (CFL) administration from Return Path to Yahoo Customer Care. We will continue sending spam reports during this transition. However, you will need to save existing...

ROKSO lawsuit settled

Earlier this year Ken Magill reported that a judge in the UK was allowing a libel case against Spamhaus to go forward. I thought for sure I’d blogged about the case at the time, but apparently I didn’t. The short version is that today Spamhaus announced the lawsuit was settled and the complainants paid for Spamhaus’ legal fees. As with most legal cases the details are complex...

Image Blocking

I received this email earlier this week, an email that I wanted but this is how it arrived. The email contained a single image link, a text line of who the message was sent to, the senders name, address, and finally an unsubscribe link. Good news, the email is CAN-SPAM compliant! Bad news, I have no idea what the content of the message is and it looks somewhat spammy.  The email was sent to my...

Another M3AAWG on the books

Another M3AAWG is over. It was great to see old friends, some of whom I’ve known for more than a decade. It was even better to meet new people who I’m sure will become old friends. The conference has grown so much bigger than my first MAAWG back in San Diego (MAAWG 3 in 2005). That was maybe a hundred people. Today M3AAWG has more members companies than were at the original conference...

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