Asides

Yahoo List-Unsub header

Last week some folks were mentioning a spike in unsubscribes from Yahoo. This is being investigated.

It's not a technical problem

You can’t technical your way out of the bulk folder. I wrote that a year and a half ago, and it’s even more true today. Filters at the big webmail providers continue to evolve to meet new threats and new spamming techniques. Sending technically perfect mail won’t get your mail into the inbox. Recipients have to want the mail and interact with the mail for good delivery.

Edison acquires part of Return Path

Today Matt Blumberg announced that Edison Software acquired Return Path’s Consumer Insight division, current customers and some Return Path staff.
Congrats to everyone involved.

RR FBL: it's officially dead

The Roadrunner Postmaster page says the FBL is deactivated.

OTA joins the ISOC

The Online Trust Alliance (OTA) announced today they were joining forces with the Internet Society (ISOC). Starting in May, they will operate as an initiative under the ISOC umbrella.
“The Internet Society and OTA share the belief that trust is the key issue in defining the future value of the Internet,” said Internet Society President and CEO, Kathryn Brown. “Now is the right time for these two organizations to come together to help build user trust in the Internet. At a time when cyber-attacks and identity theft are on the rise, this partnership will help improve security and data privacy for users,” added Brown.

Friday blogging… or lack of it

It seems the last few Friday’s I’ve been lax on posting. Some of that is just by Friday I’m frantically trying to complete all my client deliverables before the weekend. The rest of it is by Friday I’m just tired. Today had the added complication of watching the Trumpcare debate and following how (and how soon) it would affect my company if it passed.
That’s been a bit distracting, along with the other stuff I posted about yesterday. I wish everyone a great weekend.

Indictments in Yahoo data breach

Today the US government unsealed an indictment against 2 Russian agents and 2 hackers for breaking into Yahoo’s servers and stealing personal information. The information gathered during the hack was used to target government officials, security employees and private individuals.
Email is so central to our online identity. Compromise an email account and you can get access to social media, and other accounts. Email is the key to the kingdom.

Blogging

It’s been a wild week here in the US. I have to admit, the current political climate is affecting my ability to blog about email. I’ve always said email is not life or death. And how can I focus on the minutia of deliverability when things are in such turmoil and uncertainty? There are many things I want to write about, including some resources for those of us who are struggling with the current administration and changes in the US. What we can do. What we must do. It just takes work and focus I don’t have right now.

Email trends for 2017

Freshmail has published a list of email marketing trends for 2017 from some of their favorite experts. I am honored to be included.
Go check it out!

AOL FBL change

Reminder for folks, AOL is changing their FBL from address starting on Jan 17th.
The (in)famous scomp@aol.net is going away to be replaced by fbl-no-reply @ postmaster.aol.com. These messages will be signed with the d= mx.postmaster.aol.com.
Time to update your scripts!

Vague reports of Yahoo problems

A number of people, on different forums, have been asking if anyone is seeing a higher bounce rate than usual with Yahoo. Not sure exactly what’s going on here. As I understand it, folks are talking with Yahoo about it. If I hear anything more, I’ll share.
For now, though, if you’re seeing a small increase in Yahoo bounces (or other weirdnesses) others are seeing something odd, too.

Responsive design just got easier at Gmail

Today Gmail announced they are supporting media queries in Gmail and Google Inbox. This should simplify the creation of emails for multiple platforms. The full list of supported rules can be found on the Google Developer Site.

Brief blogging break

Sorry about the unexpected hiatus. I picked up a cold that really made me feel fuzzy and writing was an exercise in futility. I’ll be back Monday.
Meanwhile, Oracle bought another ESP (Bronto) when they bought NetSuite.

US-EU Privacy Shield Approved

Since the Safe Harbor rules were struck down by EU courts, the US and EU have been in negotiations to replace it. This morning (pacific time) the EU approved the new rules called Privacy Shield. WSJ Article

GOP candidate not doing email well

According to Adage and Return Path, Donald Trump’s mail campaign is not one to write home about. He’s not asking for donations and has a high rate of spam complaints.

Gmail / Apps authentication issues

I’ve seen several reports of unexpected rejections for unauthenticated email to Google over IPv6 today. Unauthenticated mail over IPv6 is a bad idea, but Google usually spam folders it rather than rejecting it.
The Gmail status dashboard is reporting an issue “Some messages sent to consumer Gmail accounts are being rejected due to authentication enforcement” so something isn’t working as intended.

Looking forward in email

Len Shneyder writes about what we can expect to see in the near future email landscape.

FCC notice of proposed rulemaking

The FCC recently published a notice of proposed rulemaking that will have an impact on how we fight abuse on the internet. M³AAWG has submitted a comment on the proposal (pdf link). All submissions can be found on the FCC website.

Hotmail having a bad day

Hotmail seems to be having a bad day, responding to a lot of delivery attempts with “554 Transaction failed” responses.
It’s not you, it’s them. They’re aware of the issue.

HE.net DNS problems

Hurricane Electric had a significant outage of their authoritative DNS servers this morning, causing them to return valid responses with no results for all(?) queries. This will have caused delivery problems for any mail going to domains using HE.net DNS – which will include some of their colocation customers, as well as users of their free services – but also will have caused reverse DNS to fail for most servers hosted by Hurricane Electric worldwide, so if any of your mail is being sent from HE hosted machines you may have seen problems.
(We’re HE customers so we noticed. Still happy with them as a vendor.)

65.0.0.0/8 DNS issues

If you’re sending email from any address beginning with a 65 – in 65.0.0.0/8 – it’s possible you’ll see some delivery problems.
Something appears to be broken with dnssec signatures for the reverse DNS zone, leading queries for reverse DNS to fail for anyone using a dnssec aware DNS resolver (which is almost everyone).

Our green bar certificate is going away

Later today we’ll be switching from an Extended Validation (“green bar”) SSL certificate to a Domain Validation certificate. This isn’t exactly a planned change but I’m waiting for responses from Comodo before I go into it too much. I’ll share some more details next week.

Lost in the mists of time

Over on the Farsight Security blog Joe St. Sauver talks about some of the early days of online abuse, on usenet. Laura and I were on the periphery of early usenet abuse, mostly as users, but Usenet (and IRC) around then were the places we both started with email abuse.

Ongoing Yahoo delays

I’ve been hearing from folks over the last few days that they’re seeing an uptick in deferrals from Yahoo! The deferrals are not uniform. ESPs report they’re seeing some, but not all, customers affected. Other ESPs aren’t seeing any changes.
It’s not just you. But it would be very worthwhile to dig into engagement and other stats. It’s possible this is a new normal at Yahoo! and they’re tightening filters to catch mail that doesn’t fit their standards but was previously difficult to filter.

AOL starts using Sender Score Certification

Good news for Sender Score Certified IPs. Return Path recently announced that AOL has joined the list of ISPs offering preferential treatment to certified IPs.

iCloud Service Disruption

40% of iCloud users were affected this morning during a service disruption between 2:15AM and 9:30AM. Apple System Status

Clear and Clearwire.net

As of April 15th, Clearwire will no longer support their CLEAR Email/Clearwire Email services which include @clear.net and @clearwire.net mail domains. They were acquired by Sprint and these domains will bounce after April 15th 2015.
Many thanks to Anthony Chiulli from Salesforce for the tip.

iCloud Postmaster resources

iCloud Mail (mac.com, me.com, icloud.com) has a shiny, new postmaster resources page. No whitelist, no FBL, just a good list of best practices to follow for sending bulk mail.

Verizon agrees to buy AOL

Verizon Agrees to Buy AOL for $4.4 Billion

Lyris to be acquired by Aurea

Aurea, a technology solutions provider, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Lyris.

Another acquisition

Netsuite has entered an agreement to acquire Bronto. Congrats to the folks at Bronto.

Yahoo FBL Down

We’re seeing multiple reports that the Yahoo feedback loop stopped working some time in the past couple of days. If you’re not seeing reports, it’s not just you.

Tweets from engagement and deliverability webinar

Want to see some of the tweets shared during the EEC Deliverability and Engagement webinar on March 17? Check out what was said as it happened.

Ransomware email protected by DMARC

Virus bulletin has an interesting post about DMARC and how some criminals are protecting their emails with DMARC.

A must read on engagement

I really can’t add anything to what Chad wrote in Opens, Clicks, And Blocks In The Third Age Of Email Deliverability

Everyone.net SMTP Issues

Everyone.net engineers are investigating a SMTP connectivity issue.
Everyone.net Status Page

Listcast acquired by MailerMailer

Listcast, an email list management service, has been acquired. MailerMailer will take over management and support of all Listcast customers effective immediately from Domainate, Inc.

Barracuda Email Security Service disruption

Starting around ~~10:15~~ 2:45 EDT this morning, the Barracuda Email Security Service is having a issues processing email for customers.
More information on Twitter and reddit

Congestion at Verizon

Yahoo! finally found their broken cable (I had no idea Yahoo had fiber) and fixed it. Now, I’m seeing a lot of reports that Verizon is accepting mail very, very slowly. Some folks are reporting no more than 20 messages a minute. This could be due to congestion, and just an underpowered system, or it could be some purposeful throttling on Verizon’s end.
In any case, this is affecting a lot of senders and not just the marketing end of things.
Updates as I get them.

Bounces at Verizon

There have been lots of reports of Verizon rejecting valid email addresses for a few hours this morning. They seem to have fixed things now but you probably want to make sure you didn’t suppress those addresses.

What about the bots?

M³AAWG published a letter to the FCC addressing the implementation of CSRIC III Cybersecurity Best Practices (pdf link)
The takeaway is that of the ISPs that contribute data to M³AAWG (37M+ users), over 99% of infected users receive notification that they are infected.
I hear from senders occasionally that they are not the problem, bots are the problem and why isn’t anyone addressing bots. The answer is that people are addressing the bot problem.

Dealing with compromised user accounts

M³AAWG is on a roll lately with published documents. They recently released the Compromised User ID Best Practices (pdf link).

Changing your email address

Over at Mediapost, Loren McDonald talks about how hard it’s been to change his email address when his employer got bought out.

4 email marketing myths

Tom Sather speaks about 4 email marketing myths that just won’t die. Tom has it absolutely right, these are things people believe that not true.

Email templates using Grunt

A Grunt workflow for designing and testing HTML email templates with SCSS.

AOL compromise

Lots of reports today of a security problem at AOL where accounts are sending spam, or are being spoofed in spam runs or something. Details are hazy, but there seems to be quite a bit of noise surrounding this incident. AOL hasn’t provided any information as of yet as to what is going on.

ReturnPath on DMARC+Yahoo

Over at ReturnPath Christine has an excellent non-technical summary of the DMARC+Yahoo situation, along with some solid recommendations for what actions you might take to avoid the operational problems it can cause.

AOL problems

Lots of people are reporting ongoing (RTR:GE) messages from AOL today. This indicates the AOL mail servers are having problems and can’t accept mail. This has nothing to do with spam, filtering or malicious email. This is simply their servers aren’t functioning as well as they should be and so AOL can’t accept all the mail thrown at them. These types of blocks resolve themselves.
Update Feb 8, 2016: AOL users are having problems logging in. Word to the Wise cannot help you. Please do not contact us for help. Contact AOL directly.

Fixing discussion lists to work with new Yahoo policy

Al has some really good advice on how to fix discussion lists to work with the new Yahoo policy.
One thing I would add is the suggestion to actually check dmarc records before assuming policy. This will not only mean you’re not having to rewrite things that don’t need to be rewritten, but it will also mean you won’t be caught flat footed if (when?) other free mail providers start publishing p=reject.

Sendgrid's open letter to Gmail

Paul Kincaid-Smith wrote an open letter to Gmail about their experiences with the Gmail FBL and how the data from Gmail helped Sendgrid find problem customers.
I know a lot of folks are frustrated with Gmail not returning more than statistics, but there is a place for this type of feedback within a comprehensive compliance desk.

What goes into successful email campaigns?

Campaign Monitor analyzed over 2.2 million campaigns and came up with some rules of thumb for effective email marketing.

FB email, put a fork in it

Today Facebook quietly put a bullet in the heart of it’s email program. Instead of running mailboxes, mail to Facebook addresses now simply forwarded to the users primary email address. Color me unsurprised.

Massive new phishing run

It seems while the experts are meeting to figure out how to stop spam, the spammers are exploiting new ways to spam. This morning my mailbox had over 100 messages with either the subject “market report” or “eviction notice.” What headers I checked showed this was from a botnet, sent to dozens of addresses at my domains.

So much to write about

This was a great MAAWG conference and there are a couple sessions I can write about. There were multiple sessions where representatives from various blocking groups and ISPs talked about what they block on. I have extensive notes and will be writing things up in the next few days.
The awesome folks at Mailchimp brought t-shirts for us.

LinkedIn shuts down Intro product

Intro was the LinkedIn product that created an email proxy where all email users sent went through LinkedIn servers. This week LinkedIn announced it is discontinuing the product. They promise to find new ways to worm their way into the inbox, but intercepting and modifying user mail doesn’t seem to have been a successful business model.

Cloudmark posted their Global Spam Threat Report for 2013.

Cloudmark Annual Global Messaging Threat Report. Nothing too surprising here, but useful for anyone in the email space to check out.

NetSol opts users into new $1850 security program

Network Solutions Auto Enroll Security

Target, Epsilon, Spam

If you enter “bfi0” into the Google search box, it’s suggestions are:

Transcript of Google hearing

I’ve not had a chance to read it, yet, but the transcript of the September hearing for the wiretapping case against Google is available. (pdf download)

Gmail opens… anyone seeing changes?

I’m wondering if people are seeing any changes in open rates now that gmail defaulted to on.
Anyone got any quick feedback?

Gmail speaks on image caching

Gmail released a blog post last week discussing their new image caching and why they implemented it. The short version is this is a way to improve the gmail user experience by screening images for malicious activity and serving the images faster from the Google caching machines.

Email against Humanity

“Sending an email is one of the worst things you can do to a person. You are stealing a little part of their life away. 99.99% of all emails are incredibly annoying and a huge imposition. If your job is to write emails, you should always be fighting to send fewer things and make sure each email you send is so incredible that it’s a rare treat to hear from you.”
Cards Against Humanity at MailChimp

SBCGlobal having a bad day

I’m seeing scattered reports of the SBCGlobal.net MTAs refusing connections. No current information about fixes.

Holiday mailing advice from mailbox providers

Christine Borgia has a post on the Return Path blog where she interviews a number of different groups (spamfilters, DNSBLs, mailbox providers) about their filtering strategy for the holidays. Overall, no one changes their filtering during the Holiday Mailing Season. On the other hand, many marketers do change their marketing strategies in ways that trigger more filtering and blocking.
The take home message? Pay attention to what is being sent and who it is being sent to. This is nothing new, but many marketers seem to forget it in the effort to get into their customers’ inboxes.

Posts and articles about the DMA spamming

The DMA kicks spam up a notch
The DMA: Spamming Job Services to a Purchased List
The DMA Spams A Bunch of Anti-spammers
The DMA sends e-mail that’s memorable, but not in a good way

Experian selling data to identity thieves

If you’re not following or reading Brian Krebs, you should be. He does some of the best investigative reporting in the email, security and internet space. Today’s blog post is a disturbing look into the data selling and identity theft industries. Brian details evidence that shows Experian (yes, that Experian) has been selling consumer data to identity thieves.

ICANN goes after Dynamic Dolphin

ICANN sent a letter to domain registrar Dynamic Dolphin notifying them of their non-compliance with the ICANN Registrar Agreement.
HT: Neil Schwartzman
(Today appears to be retro-blogging day. First I blog about s.1618 then I blog about Scott Richter.)

Yahoo trying to cope with misdirected email

Techcrunch says Yahoo is announcing a new “this is not me” button for email sent to recovered addresses.

Things real people don't say about advertising

My favorite is about the call to action, but it’s probably not quite safe for work.
Sadly, I do sometimes try and figure out what segment I’m in that caused me to get a particular ad.

Insights on how to improve email marketing

I can’t do anything except say +1 to this list of ineffective habits of email marketers from Loren McDonald.

Major payday loan email sender shut down

Chattanooga area payday lender Carey V. Brown lays off workers

Ken gets spam

Ken at Popehat gets spam offering to write a sponsored post. Ken counters with what he wants out of a sponsored post.
Blogging is going to be light this week. I’ve got a couple project deadlines to meet and most of my focus is on that. Plus, it’s the end of August and most folks are on vacation.

Gmail promotions tab

Chad White explains why you shouldn’t ask recipients to move mail from the promotions tab to the inbox.

VerticalResponse acquired

The acquisition of email service providers continues. Last week Deluxe (yes, the check printing people) acquired Vertical Response. This appears to be positioning themselves to improve their collection of business services to include email marketing.

Sending mail to the wrong person, part eleventy

Another person has written another blog post talking about their experiences with an email address a lot of people add to mailing lists without actually owning the email address. In this case the address isn’t a person’s name, but is rather just what happens when you type across rows on they keyboard.
These are similar suggestions to those I (and others) have made in the past. It all boils down to allow people who never signed up for your list, even if someone gave you their email address, to tell you ‘This isn’t me.” A simple link in the mail, and a process to stop all mail to that address (and confirm it is true if someone tries to give it to you again), will stop a lot of unwanted and unasked for email.

Spammers already abusing Vine

Spammers have already figured out how to abuse the new twitter video service (VINE) to make money. I wish I could say I was surprised, but spammers (and scammers) are some of the earliest adopters of technology out there. They adopt it and try to extract as much money as possible before the property owners can catch up and implement anti-abuse technology.
Too few companies actually build products with anti-abuse technology built in. This costs them and the victims money.

Feedback from recipients

Please Don’t Add Me to Your Email List
Email marketing wisdom from Forbes and someone who spends a lot of time networking and handing out business cards.

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.

Seedy underworld

ESPs have to deal with spammers, phishers and scammers getting onto their networks. Mailgun talks about some of the things they’ve found our about these problem customers.

Think before scheduling tweets

My twitter feeds exploded with discussion and comments and retweets about the explosions in Boston this afternoon. One of my friends even commented, “It’s days like today when you can tell who is scheduling tweets.”
If you are scheduling tweets it’s really important to have someone around to monitor local, national or international events and stop those tweets before your brand looks insensitive.

Marketo files for IPO

Marketo filed documents for a $75M IPO yesterday.

Spamhaus answers about the recent DoS attack

Answers about recent DDoS attack on Spamhaus

Bad Neighborhoods on the Internet

Of the 42,000 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) surveyed, just 20 were found to be responsible for nearly half of all the internet addresses that send spam.

Network World on Spamhaus

Spamhaus warns marketers to keep email databases tidy

The 5 stages of a Spamhaus listing

Courtesy of Spencer over at Experian.
The 5 Stages of Recovery

Irony

Saw this on twitter today:

Oh, the irony of an append vendor using COI for a whitepaper download.
Read More

New player in the DMARC space

Over on the DMARC-Discuss list, Comcast announced they had turned on DMARC validation and companies that publish DMARC records should start receiving reports from Comcast.

Color me unsurprised

Groupon and other Daily Deals programs struggling to find a sustainable business.

More on the Yahoo exploit

Exacttarget’s Carlo Catajan talks about the Yahoo exploit. My own mailbox seems to indicate this hole is closed.

Canada publishes updated proposed regulations for CASL

Based on initial feedback collected in 2011, updated regulations for CASL have been published by the Industry Canada. Interested stakeholders have until February 4, 2013 to comment on the proposed regulations.
Edit: to identify correct Canadian Govt Agency (Thanks, Neil!)

Hotmail issues

A number of people, both at ESPs and on the mailops mailing list, are reporting problems at Hotmail. The most common reports are senders getting

Data, data, elections and data

One of the interesting stories coming out of the recent US Presidential election is how much data the Obama Campaign collected about voters, volunteers and donors. Today Politico talks about how valuable that data is, and how many Democrats want to get their hands on it.

An interesting look at best practices

Which best practice is ruining your business?

Collaboration key to fighting crime on the internet

The Pittsburg Post Gazette has a good article on the DNS Changer Working group and how it can serve as a model for future collaboration against cyber crime.

Spamming is a marketing tactic

A twitter discussion about the use of Re: and FWD: in subject lines for bulk email. The summary appears to be that even marketers hate it when they get mail like that, but if it drives sales then it’s a worthwhile trick. The final tweet says a lot, though.

Return Path announces new abuse prevention service

Return Path announced a new product this morning, designed to help mailbox providers stop outbound abuse.

Retrying mail to AOL

I’m working on stuff for MAAWG so I’m really not all that up on what’s happening in the world of email recently. A lot of folks are commenting on my AOL post, and I’m hearing that queues are backing up and emptying as AOL makes changes.
One thing people have been asking me is if they should retry mail to the addresses that are bouncing. I say yes, absolutely. Some of the error messages are related to real filters, but there seems to be quite a bit of slop in the filters these days. I think, though, that the recipients do exist and removing the addresses from future mailings is premature.

DMARC Interoperability

Facebook hosted a DMARC interoperability event earlier this week. In terms of protocol development, interoperability events are a sign that the protocol is ready for more widespread use.

Thinking of increasing email frequency for the holidays?

Then you have to read this post by Dayne Shuda on EmailCritic. How to handle Email Frequency During the Busy Holiday Season.

Harvesting is alive and well

I’m finding out that email address harvesting off websites is alive and well on the Internet. We have a rotating address on the contact page, which does get harvested but usually the spam is attempting to sell me blog related services. I didn’t expect to get a very different collection of emails to the address I posted here. I’m quite surprised that address is getting a completely different type of spam from the contact address.
The one thing that harvesters appear to have in common is sending CAN SPAM violating email. Both the contact address and the questions address get lots of mail that is in violation of US (and California) law. One of these days I might get bored enough to file a suit against one of them and blog about it.

Misdirected email

Al has another post about another company sending mail to a customer that gave an email address that didn’t belong to them. The person receiving the misdirected email has no effective way to make it stop, and is getting more and more frustrated with the ongoing spam. (Consumerist article)

Spamhaus dDOS

I got mail late last night from one of the Spamhaus peeps telling me that they were under a distributed Denial of Service (dDOS) attack. This is affecting email. Incoming email is delayed and they’re having difficulty sending outgoing email. This is affecting their responses to delisting queries.
They are working on mitigation and hopefully will be fully up and running soon.
Updates when I get them.
Update (8/29/2012): mail to Spamhaus should be back.

Metrics, metrics, metrics

I’ve been sitting on this one for about a week, after the folks over at IBM/Pivotal Veracity called me to tell me about this. But now their post is out, so I can share.
There are ISPs providing real metrics to senders: QQ and Mail.ru. Check out Laura Villevieille’s blog post for the full details.

Spamming the wrong person

Chris from Cloudmark tracks a UK text spammer.

Outlook.com

The big news in email today is Microsoft’s announcement of the next version of Hotmail: Outlook.com. This does appear to be an attempt to compete with a host of Google’s offerings. Not only does Outlook.com include Skype and access to social media accounts, but it also includes web app versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint with 7GB of storage space.
I’m not sure how actively people will be grabbing Outlook.com addresses, as you can use hotmail.com addresses with the Outlook.com interface. Only time will tell, though, how this affects email marketing and spam filtering.

More about the mail.ru FBL

Len Shneyder has a really interesting post up about the mail.ru feedback loop and the broader message this sends about the intersection of social media and email marketing. Go read it!

Phishing and trust

Tom Sather has a great post up on the RP Email marketing blog discussing phishing. His point is that phishing lowers the overall trust in email marketing. He lists a number of things marketers should consider doing to counteract that loss of trust.
I rely heavily on the use of tagged addresses to deal with phishing in my own mailbox. If an email doesn’t come to the right address, then it’s immediately tossed as a phish. Unfortunately, as data leaks increase this is becoming less effective as a strategy.

Report Spam button

Cloudmark has an interesting discussion about the Report Spam button and how it’s used.

Deliverability of Facebook.com email addresses

Christopher Penn at What Counts did some testing to see what delivery to Facebook.com addresses looks like. It looks pretty grim.

Engagement in email

From Tim Roe at eConsultancy.com: Is engagement email marketing finally here?
Tim lays out a number of factors for why engagement is important in email marketing and how to use engagement to improve ROI.

Gmail filtering

Derek Harding has a pair of articles on ClickZ about Gmail giving their users information about why a particular email message was filtered.
What Gmail Teaches Us about Spam Filtering
Gmail Filtering: The Spam Disposition
Both articles are worth a read. They talk about what we know about Gmail and what we can infer from the data they provide to senders.

Things people hate about your email marketing

I found this article over on Hubspot, and I think it covers a lot of why people hate email marketing quite well.

Congrats!

Congratulations go out to Matt Blumberg for being named one of the top entrepreneurs for 2012 by Crain’s New York Business!

AOL update

A reader has been talking with AOL about the mtain* responses that people were receiving. AOL has said both responses mentioning mtain-*.r1000.mx.aol.com are actually DNY:T1 bounces that are being presented incorrectly. Both responses should be treated the same as 421 DYN:T1.

AOL … again

A number of senders are reporting that they’re getting unusual responses from AOL servers. The responses include:

Return Path on Content Filtering

Return Path have an interesting post up about content filtering. I like the model of 3 different kinds of filters, in fact it’s one I’ve been using with clients for over 18 months. Spamfiltering isn’t really about one number or one filter result, it’s a complex interaction of lots of different heuristics designed to answer the question: do recipients want this kind of mail?

AOL: Still broken

I’m still hearing reports that AOL is still having problems accepting mail. I’ve also heard they’re still working on it. There is no information on when a fix may be finished.

Five-Ten blacklist retired

The Five-Ten website has a notice that they have retired the blacklist. Five-Ten wasn’t the greatest list for blocking mail, they aggressively listed senders and there were a number of false positives against a standard mail stream. But it was useful as a touchpoint. If I had a client that wasn’t listed on Five-Ten that told me something about their normal practices.

77% prefer email for marketing

77% of those surveyed preferred email for permission-based promotional messages, soundly beating the next most popular, direct mail, at 9%. Email, still anything but dead.
This, and lots of other interesting things, in ExactTarget’s 2012 Channel Preference Survey.

Anti-Botnet Code of Conduct Published

The Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC) published a Anti-botnet code of conduct for ISPs. This is a purely voluntary code for U.S. ISPs that want to mitigate the botnet threat to follow. You can download a full copy of the final report from the MAAWG website. The FCC has published a fact sheet about the report on their own website.

Lasting effects from aggressive marketing

Return Path has an interesting post on the lasting effects of aggressive holiday marketing.

Leap day email promotions

I’ve been seeing a number of companies send out email marketing special offers for Leap day. My favorite so far:
Celebrating Leap Day with Free Standard Ground Shipping on your $29 purchase

Spam poetry

An actual spam I just received:
Rapturously for laura@myaddress.invalid
But that one word expressed an entreaty, a threat, and above all conction that she would herself regret her words.
Proposal area: Drop in Now
Without equivocation your, Mcpartland Kleutertafel.

Before you build a list

I can’t add much more to Steve Denner’s article about building list size.

MAAWG travel alert

For those of you coming to the Bay Area for MAAWG and considering flying into Oakland, be aware the Bay Bridge will be closed in the Oakand -> San Francisco direction for all of President’s day weekend. BART is unaffected, but if you’re planning on driving from Oakland into the city, you’ll have to do it by going south over the San Mateo bridge and then back north to the city.

DKIM deployment challenges

Cloudmark has an interesting blog post pointing out some of the challenges of signing mail with DKIM in a large company with a diverse mail system.

What are you validating?

Al throws in his own two cents on the question of real time address validation.

Is any data safe?

Today another major retailer announced their customer files were compromised. This company had clearly implemented some security that kept hackers from getting too much information. Passwords were hashed and credit card numbers were kept on a separate server, which does signal that the company designed with security in mind. Nevertheless, personal information was compromised.
Is there anyway to keep information safe if it’s accessible from the internet? Some of my uber-security conscious friends would say no. I am beginning to believe them.

The Constitutionality of SOPA

Lawrence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, says SOPA violates the first amendment.

SOPA / PIPA

I’ve not mentioned anything about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and it’s companion bill the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) that are currently making their ways through Congress. Both bills put a lot of obligation on the ISPs to stop bad traffic on the Internet. Unfortunately, it seems no one writing the bill asked anyone with technical or operational experience for input. Many of the obligations are going to significantly impact ISP functioning and will probably degrade service for users.
The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group sent a letter to congress yesterday (PDF link), outlining the issues with SOPA and PIPA. I found it explained the bills and the flaws much better than many other summaries.

Yahoo awarded $610 million

The Federal district court in New York awarded Yahoo $610 million dollars in a suit they filed in 2008.

We lie more in email than in person

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

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.

More on Rove Digital

Brian Krebs has more on Rove Digital and the criminal connection to other scammers and spammers.

Email in 2030

As predicted by Mark Brownlow. My favorite? You can still buy 1 million email addresses for $99. It’s still a bad idea.

Changes at Hotmail

Microsoft announced a number of changes to the Hotmail interface today. It doesn’t look like this will affect how mail is received, but will affect how users can interact with it.
As always, the best advice I can give you is send mail people want and like.

Links Sept 29, 2011

Al Iverson has a post up about his experiences with customers who try to acquire email addresses through appending.
J.D. Falk has a post up about the history of DKIM.

10 years

Today is our 10 year anniversary in business. It’s been quite a ride.
Thank you to all our customers, friends, supporters and followers.

20% of email read on mobile phones

According to data published by Litmus this week.

A recipient's view on engagement

I found a blog post from a technical type talking about email engagement. This is a non-marketing way to do things, and probably won’t work for many marketing programs. But I think good marketers should be listening to what their recipients say, even if it’s counter-intuitive.
Edit 9/15: the website seems to have expired so I changed the link to the google cache of the article.

Don't think bounce handling is important?

James from Cloudmark has his own insight on spamtraps.

CAN SPAM and the first amendement

From Venkat at Eric Goldman’s blog we find the federal court has rejected an attempt to claim spam was “protected anonymous speech.”

The little things

It really amuses me when I get blatant spam coming from a network belonging to one of our Abacus customers. I know that the complaint will be handled appropriately.
It’s even better when the spam advertises the filter busting abilities of the spammer. I get a warm, fuzzy feeling to know that the spammer is going to be looking for a new host in the immediate future.

Return Path speaks about Gmail

Melinda Plemel has a post on the Return Path blog discussing delivery to Gmail.

Charter hard bounces valid addresses

Last week Charter had a technical problem that caused them to respond with “user unknown” to email sent to valid users.
I recommend re-activating any address to Charter that was disabled July 14 or 15.

TWSD: I can haz ethix marketing

I’m getting slammed by spam advertising URLs at http://perfectdeliveries.com/ from
Ethix Marketing LLC
711 S. Carson Street Suite 4
Carson City, Nevada 89701
The kicker? They’re violating CAN SPAM while they’re doing it. Seriously, sending mail out through open relays and proxies with forged From: addresses is a violation of CAN SPAM. And they’re spamming for ambulance chasers.
Spammers, eh?

Whatcounts acquires Blue Sky Factory

As has been announced across the email industry, Whatcounts has acquired Blue Sky Factory.

New FBLs

There are two new FBLs in production. Synacor and Fastmail.fm. I’ll be updating the Wiki and FBL page today.

The weak link in security

Terry Zink posts about the biggest problem with security: human errors. Everyone who is looking at security needs to think about the human factor. And how people can deliberately or accidentally subvert security.

e360 and the appeals court

Oral arguments in Spamhaus’ appeal were held last week. Mickey blogged about it on Thursday. I heard from him and a bunch of the Spamhaus folks about it at MAAWG, but was busy enough that I didn’t get a chance to listen to it. Mickey is not exaggerating on how badly the judges, particularly Judge Posner, beat up on e360’s lawyer. More quotes are available at Appeals judges berate spammer for “ridiculous,” “incompetent” litigation.

Buying lists

The problem with buying lists is that you never know which consumers are already on your list and you risk spamming current subscribers.

User education doesn't work

A growing OSX security problem illustrates why user education is not the solution to virus, spam or malware problems.
HT: @briankrebs

Food for thought

Companies that can’t be bothered to implement good subscription practices will rarely be bothered to send relevant or engaging email.
True or False?

I hate spam

But sometimes it makes me laugh. Yesterday I got a 419 that said, “[…]have been diagonalized with HIV/AIDS which has defiled all forms of medical treatment[…]” Diagonalized? Defiled all forms of treatment?
At least it was entertaining, right?

Auto-acks don't create a contract

From Eric Goldman’s blog Acknowledging Receipt of an Email Doesn’t Form a Contract–Stebbins v. Wal-Mart. I know a number of people who have tried the “if you do X, we will have a contract” trick and it’s nice to see the courts pointing out how silly this is.

Epsilon: Calm and Cool Tempered

Stefano over at emailmarketingblog.it translated our blog post about Epsilon into Italian: Epsilon e la sicurezza dei dati sensibili: calma e sangue freddo.

News about the Rustock takedown

Spam levels plummeted 2 weeks ago as the Rustock botnet was beheaded. Reports have been trickling out in the press about the takedown, about the botnet and about the team responsible.
Rustock Takedown Analysis at The Register
Brian Krebs’ intitial report of the takedown
Taking down botnets from a Microsoft attorney
Spam Network Shut Down at the Wall Street Journal
Global Spam Levels Graph from Symantec

Thank you, Fred!

I am honored and humbled to be called out as a Goddess of Email Deliverability by Fred Tabsharani in his recent deliverability.com post. He has named and lauded people I am proud to call colleagues and friends. Thank you, Fred.

SORBS Progress

A little bird tells me that GFI have resolved their primary blocking issue on SORBS problems. If all goes well I’d expect their infrastructure and policies to improve significantly over the next few months. We’ll wait and see whether the data quality begins to improve after that.

Industry Jargon

I have a new laptop, so I’m having to teach the spellchecker some words it doesn’t know.
deliverability, unsubscription, MAAWG, DKIM, epending, ESP, smarthost, return-path …
There sure are a lot of words in the email business that outsiders might not recognize or understand.

Expiring emails

J.D. Falk posts over on the Return Path blog about the new proposed standard for expiring email. It’s an interesting concept, but like J.D. I don’t see it going very far.

Marketing on Facebook

An interesting look at what doesn’t work when marketing on Facebook.

Brand engagement in social media

Adobe has a good post up about consumer reaction and interaction with brands in social media like Twitter and Facebook.

Plenty of Fish hack

There’s been a lot of press recently about the Plenty of Fish hack and their response to it.

Groupon and science

And interesting reaction to a recent Groupon offer for spa services.

Legal analysis of Hypertouch v. Valueclick

Venkat has an analysis of the Hypertouch v. Valueclick case and recent appeals court ruling.

Fines for not honoring unsubscribes

Virgin Blue has been fined $110,000 by the Australian government for not honoring unsubscribes.

Still more spam stats

Mailchannels put together another post looking at spam volumes. Related to that, many people are reporting that bot levels are climbing again.

Changes at Yahoo

Deliverability.com has a blog post from Naeem Kayani at Adknowledge about the recent Yahoo changes. They point to the reputation of the From: address as a factor. I’m not sure anyone knows what exactly Yahoo is doing, but the suggestions from Naeem are good ones.

The hard sell works

Ken Magill, dad extraordinaire, describes how he went above and beyond the call to get his son a DVD while battling hard sell marketing techniques.

Ask; Don't Assume.

Asking for permission is an obvious best practice in email marketing. But, it applies to billing and fees as well, if you ask the FTC. Click here to read about their settlement with Jason Strober of payday loan marketer Swish Marketing.

Does your signup pass muster?

On Eric Goldman’s blog, Venkat discusses a recent fifth circuit decision about an online signup process and what the court will look at when considering a claim that a user didn’t read an online disclaimer.

Abuse Reporting Format

J.D. has a great post digging into ARF, the abuse reporting format used by most feedback loops.
If you’re interested in following along, you might find this annotated example ARF report handy.

In Atlanta through Friday

Off to visit the Chimps this week in Atlanta. Blogging from me may be light, but Steve will be around.

Spammers quickly adopting social media

Spammers have already discovered they can send spam through Apple’s new Ping service. Yes, some of the fastest adopters of new technology are spammers.
Isn’t technology wonderful?

Gmail and SenderScore

Return Path discusses that a high (>80) SenderScore is correlated with inbox delivery at Gmail.

Limited email at gmail

Mike Monteiro has a screenshot of what happens when you actually fill up a gmail inbox.
How much of that mail is spam, I wonder?
HT: Laughing Squid

Don't always believe the statistics

Mark Brownlow has a great roundup of how statistics and data can mislead marketers if they’re not really paying attention.

Freemail opens

Justin Coffey commented on my check your assumptions post pointing out his data on opens related to ISPs. He says:

Optonline problems

I’m hearing from multiple sources that they’ve been having problems getting mail delivered to optonline.net, optonline.com and optimum.net all day. This appears to be affecting senders across the board, from ISPs to ESPs.
It looks like something is not working right over there, and hammering retries doesn’t seem to be helping. The best recommendation is for senders to back off overnight and test some sends tomorrow.

CAN SPAM Plaintiff ordered to pay 800K in lawyer fees

Asis Internet service has been ordered to pay over $800,000 in lawyer fees to Optin Global. Venkat has details. This is the same company that was recently awarded $2.5M judgment in a different case.

About that spam suit

John Levine has a longer blog post about the Smith vs. Comcast suit. Be sure to read the comment from Terry Zink about the MS related claims.

Reddit and email

Ben over at Mailchimp writes about Reddit discovering a lot of their mail was being blocked because they were sending from the Amazon EC2 cloud.

Delivery and compliance jobs

Al is posting a list of delivery, anti-spam and compliance jobs over on Spam Resource. If you’re in the market, go check them out.

Standardizing email metrics

Slogging towards e-mail metrics standardization a report by Direct Mag on the efforts of the Email Experience Council to standardize definitions related to email marketing.

A little light post for a friday after MAAWG

10 signs you might have a deliverability issue

Permission versus forgiveness

Stephanie at Return Path has a great blog post on permission and how permission is an ongoing process not a one time thing. There were a couple statements that really grabbed my attention.

TWSD: Using FOIA requests for email addresses

Mickey has a good summary of what’s going on in Maine where the courts forced the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to sell the email addresses of license purchasers to a commercial company.
There isn’t permission associated with this and the commercial company has no pretense that the recipients want to receive mail from them. This is a bad idea and a bad way to get email addresses and is no better than spammers scraping addresses from every website mentioning “fishing” or “hunting.”

iContact lists compromised

iContact has acknowledged that (some) of their customer lists were compromised and that they are investigating. As iContact has chosen not to allow comments on that post, feel free to share comments here.
HT: @aliverson

Yahoo and Goodmail

The industry has been abuzz the last few days with the news that of Feb 1, Yahoo will no longer be supporting Goodmail in their interface. I did get a chance to get a response from someone at Yahoo, but didn’t get a chance to talk to anyone from Goodmail. Look for a post next week discussing the breakup, what impact it has on the industry and what this may mean for other ISPs.

Spammers aren't who you think they are

Shady direct marketers exploit CAN SPAM to continue spamming but protect themselves from the law. This is something I’ve been talking about for a while (TWSD), and it’s nice to see the mainstream press noticing the same thing.
HT: Box of Meat

Mickey's take on e360 settlement

Mickey has the full docs of the settlement, and talks about the implications of the confession of judgment.

Keep subscribers happy

Mark Brownlow writes about engagement. “…the people we really need to keep happy are the subscribers.” Go read the whole thing.

Delivery case study

Mailchimp published a case study looking at a customer moving from sending in house to using Mailchimp.

Time to step up

Neil Schwartzman reacts to yesterday’s link post.

How to fix delivery

For all of you that are asking “What do the ISPs want from us” Annalivia has posted a list of specifics that you can do to improve delivery.

TWSD: evade blocks

Al Iverson has responded to one of the comments on my “Changes” post.

AOL announces new postmaster pages

The new AOL postmaster pages are live at http://postmaster.info.aol.com/

AOL speaks about FBLs

Annalivia posts a guide to FBLs over on the AOL postmaster blog.

Are you listening?

One of the more common complaints from senders is that ISPs won’t tell them what to do. Al Iverson takes this on in his post “Did you catch that?” He says:

FCC Wireless list: Cox.net removed

The FCC wireless list has been updated and cox.net has been removed. The cox.net subdomains remain, but there should be no interruption of marketing mail to cox.net recipients.

What she said

Jamie Tomasello on the Cloudmark Blog:

ESPs who require and enforce best permission practices should be applying peer and industry pressure within the ESP community to adopt these policies. Ultimately, ESPs need to take responsibility for their clients’ practices. If you are aware that your clients are engaging in questionable or bad practices, address those issues before contacting an ISP or anti-spam vendor to resolve the issue.
Read More

Cyber Monday inundation

The cyber monday inundation of mail has hit my mailbox. There’s been a clear increase in marketing mail over the last week. Unfortunately for those marketers, it’s too much and I am just scanning subject lines and marking as read. I don’t have the time to read all this mail.

Sending too much mail

Not having policies restricting the amount of mail any customer or recipient receives may lead to higher spam complaint rates and blocking warns the DMA Email Marketing Council.
HT: Box of Meat

9th circuit ruling in Gordon v. Virtumundo

The 9th circuit court of appeals issued their ruling in Gordon v. Virtumundo today. The ruling was heavily in favor of Virtumundo. I have not had time to read the ruling, but both Venkat and Mickey have posts on the case and the ruling.
This is another solid blow against anti-spammers suing spammers under state laws and CAN SPAM. The problem is that many of the cases are brought by people, and lawyers, who fail to understand that just because they don’t like something doesn’t make it illegal. Spammers do a lot of bad things, but the ones you can track enough to sue are generally not breaking the law. Sadly, cases like Gordon and Mummagraphics makes it harder for ISPs to sue spammers that are actively harming the ISP and the customers.

Blog carnival deadline

Just a reminder, tomorrow is the deadline for the delivery blog carnival. I look forward to seeing your posts!

Yahoo fixed XBL problem

Yahoo sent out an email yesterday evening to their postmaster mailing list saying they believe they have fixed the issue that I mentioned earlier this week. Some of the MXs were erroneously rejecting mail claiming that the sending IPs were on the XBL.

Yahoo delivery problems

Al writes about a Yahoo delivery problem where they have identified a particular Yahoo MX that is falsely returning “mail blocked due to XBL.” The IPs in question are not on the XBL. Yahoo is aware of the issue and are working on a resolution. If you are seeing these bounces, Yahoo is aware of the issue. Exacttarget has worked around the issue by suspending deliveries to the affected MX.

Pizzanomics

Ben at Mailchimp has a very funny post about how pizza is a metric for how big your company is.

CAN SPAM Checklist

Mickey has done a comprehensive checklist looking at all the things you should do to comply with CAN SPAM.

CAN SPAM pre-emption in the courts

Ethan Ackerman has a summary of recent cases where judges are splitting over rulings on CAN SPAM pre-emption.

Update on Canadian Law

Neil Schwartzman has an update on the status of the Canadian anti-spam law currently working its way through the legislature.

Sending mail from unread email addresses

Some marketers, even large marketing companies, send mail from email addresses that are unread. Justin Premick posted a list of reasons this is a very, very bad idea. Be sure to read the comments, too.

Good email design

DJ at Bronto has another example of great email design.

What Mark Said

Mark Brownlow skewers the arguments from opt-out proponents. A definite must read.

Subscribers notice what marketers do

Stephanie Miller from RP blogs at EEC about a UK consumer survey with the take home message: “consumers notice what email marketers do. When we send something interesting and relevant at a good pace, they are happy to stay active with our programs. When we don’t… well, then we’ve lost them, perhaps for good.”

Three ways spammers get your address

Paul explains 3 ways spammers get your email address.

Open rates

Right now, there is no way to compare open rates as everyone calculates them differently. Mark Brownlow covers this today.

More on e360 v. Choicepoint

Venkat has a longer analysis of the e360 v. Choicepoint case I commented on last week. He’s predicting a quick finding in favor of Choicepoint. I’m not a legal expert by any means, but I can see both sides of this particular case. And I am not sure there is good case law to guide the judge. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

Email frequency vs. Response

Mark Brownlow has a great post today detailing how response to a marketing campaign changes with the frequency of a campaign and the value of the campaign.

List hygiene

Bronto blog has step by step directions on how to run a successful re-engagement campaign.

AOL backlog

The AOL postmaster queue is backlogged from the recent upgrades. They are working through things as fast as possible, but have warned that they expect delays until they get caught back up.

Can I use a purchased list?

Can I use a purchased list?
Thanks to the MailChimp folks for the great resource!

Landing pages

One thing I don’t talk about very much is what to do after mail has successfully been delivered to the inbox and the recipient has clicked on a link. Bronto Blog has a post from Friday with tips for successful landing pages.

Better Preheaders

Mark Brownlow has an article about using pre-header space better in your emails.

MAAWG agenda published

For those of you who are MAAWG members, the agenda for the February meeting in San Francisco has been published. Who is planning on attending?

Legitimate list vendors

In this week’s Magilla newsletter, Ken provides a number of ways to identify a bad email list vendor. His suggestions are not only appropriate for list vendors, but are also a good way to screen mail partners, customers or even vendors.

e360 v. Spamhaus

Mickey has been posting new documents in the e360 v. Spamhaus case. I’ve not had the time to read them, yet, but have seen some of the excerpts. Spamhaus is moving for summary judgment and moving to strike Mr. Lindhart’s testimony.

Mailing old files, part 2

Stephanie Miller at ReturnPath offers suggestions on how marketers can break the rules, mail old lists and reap the rewards.

FBL updates

Roadrunner shifted the release date for their new FBL to December 14th.
Despite rumors, the Yahoo FBL is not actually accepting new participants.

e360 v. Comcast

Mickey has new docs up at Spamsuite in the case between e360 and Comcast.

AOL talks about reputation

Over at the AOL postmaster blog, Christine posts about reputation and AOL.

Same old stuff

Al talks about the “new” email preference service run by the DMA. Except it is not actually new nor is it really used.

Evaluating email

DJ posts the top 4 reasons an email campaign fails.

Spam Royalty

MSNBC has a slide show up about 10 of the worst spammers, which one really is SpamKing?

Email marketing tips from The Onion

Bonnie talks about insightful email marketing tips taken from an article in The Onion.
1/7 – closed comments on this post as it seems to be a magnet for comment spam.

Another opt-in in the wild

The EEC has an article today about a poorly done opt-in email that DJ Waldo received. How close is that to what you send?

New Email RFCs

JD Falk has a good article about RFCs, email standards and delivery.

Confirmed (double) opt-in in the wild

Lashback gives an example of the use of confirmed opt-in in the wild.

What he said

After 2 weeks of travel and too many airport experiences, Seth’s post of random travel thoughts this morning resonated with me.

Fingerpointing all around

Mickey has copies of affidavits filed by David Linhardt and his lawyers all denying they were responsible for missing the court’s deadline.

MAAWG

Chris Nixon has a post talking about the background of MAAWG and why he is here in Ft. Lauderdale.

Virginia Court Ruling

John Levine has a insightful review of the recent ruling against the VA anti-spam law.

Fixing mistakes

At BeRelevant Kath posts about common mistakes mailers make and how to recover from them.

Collecting information from subscribers

VerticalResponse Blog has a post up about collecting information from subscribers to mailing lists. Go check it out.

EmailAppenders

Al points out that EmailAppenders are possibly trying to change their online reputation. To bad their “suggestion” does not work.

Upcoming Conferences

EmailKarma lists a number of upcoming events for email marketers and delivery folks.

Strategic email marketing

Mark Brownlow has an interview with Simms Jenkins the author of The Truth about Email Marketing. Well worth a read for anyone who is sending email.

AOL announces web support tool

Yesterday, David announced a new suite of tools to help senders troubleshoot blocking problems more efficiently.

CAN SPAM rules take effect

The new CAN SPAM rules take effect today. EmailKarma has a list of articles detailing the new rules. These rules govern handling of opt-outs and establish a “sender” category for purposes of physical address and opt-outs.

Another benefit of email marketing

Kevin Hillstrom over at MineThatData blog talks about using email metrics and other customer information to not market to people who cost a company money.

Analyzing email

Over at the VerticalResponse blog, Janine walks us through analyzing clicks in an email and sets herself new things to test in future mailings. Well worth a read.

Smart email marketing

Mark Brownlow has an ongoing series of posts looking at the strategies and tactics that distinguish a smart email marketer from a bulk email marketer that is well worth reading.
1/29 – comments closed due to excessive spam on this post

Excite outsourcing email

Excite announced this morning that they are outsourcing all their incoming email functions to BlueTie. This means that the Excite FBL and whitelist are being discontinued with no plans for replacement.
Over at Deliverabity.com, Dennis is accepting feedback from senders to forward on to Excite.
Edit: I am going to close comments on this post. This is not the place for Excite endusers to comment on the new changes in the interface.

Conference suggestion

Seth has a great suggestion on how to make your conference staff famous and thank them for their hard work.

New Yahoo Domains

Yahoo announced two new email domains today.

Download Day

Today Firefox3 is released. The Mozilla Foundation is trying to set a record for number of downloads in a single day. Go download it!

Authenticating email in a court of law

Venkat has a discussion of authentication needed to present emails to a judge when asking for a summary judgment.

Whitelisting

Derek has a really good article on whitelisting and what it means over at ClickZ.

Email Aptitude Test

MailChimp has an email aptitude test. How did you fare?

Mind filters

Stefan has a good article up at ClickZ about getting mail past the “mind filter”.

Broadcom Exec drugs employees

And I laughed at the people who said that some technology executives were on drugs. Over at Broadcom it looks like some of them were, but only because their CEO spiked their drinks.

Before you send email

Seth Godin lists the 38 things you should do before you send an email.

Microsoft takes on phishers

Microsoft has a post up talking about phishers and how to protect yourself.

Suppression lists

Mickey has a post up about how long senders must hold on to that suppression list.

E360 drops suit against antispammers

E360 has asked for their suit against 3 anti-spammers to be dropped with prejudice. Docs at Spamsuite, commentary at The Spam Diaries.

ReturnPath Joe Job

ReturnPath has posted information about the Joe Job against them.

Vote for a new name

Mickey is trying to decide if his blog needs a new name.

Large volumes of mail

John Levine talks about the challenge of handling large volumes of inbound email in a single mailbox.

Comcast "hacked"

Comcast recently had their whois registration password compromised by hackers, who then changed the authoritative DNS servers from the real ones to ones run by the hackers. Today Wired has an article saying that the hackers warned Comcast that this would happen.

Funding the lawsuit

Mickey asks if you want to be the sender that funds the lawsuit that establishes case law about your new, nifty process.

Israel Spam Law

Israel has passed a new anti-spam law requiring senders to only send opt-in email, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Anger

Seth Godin writes about angry people. Every marketer should ask where their recipients are on that curve.

Yahoo suing lottery spammers

Yahoo filed suit against spammers using the Yahoo trademarks in lottery spam on May 19th.

Postini bug

Ben over at MailChimp has an article talking about a recent experience with Postini and an actual bug that causes Postini to interact badly with another spamfilter and block non-spam.

Finding your relevancy

Ken Magill reported today that Responsys has unveiled a tool to measure the relevancy of email marketing programs. This tool is intended to help marketers implement the advice “be more relevant.”

Email related blog communities

I have recently become aware of 2 new blog communities based around email marketing.
One is a feedburner community Email Marketing Expert
The other is Box of Meat
Enjoy.

AOL Postmaster blog

AOL announced today they are launching a postmaster blog http://journals.aol.com/pmtjournal/blog/
I’ll be updating the blogroll, too. I’ve been checking out some new delivery / marketing blogs the last few weeks.

Email authentication

The great folks over at MailChimp have compiled a list of which authentication methods (DK, DKIM, SPF and SenderID) are in use at which ISPs.
Good stuff and very clear showing who is using what authentication.

Email Marketing for Dummies

Mark Brownlow has an interview with the author of Email Marketing For Dummies. It is a great summary of the book and gives some good hints to anyone interested in starting to use email as a marketing and customer retention tool.

Best practices and ISPs

A couple articles came out today talking about ISP requirements and how to find them.
EmailInsider talks about ISP best practices and how merely complying with CAN-SPAM is not enough to get good delivery at the ISPs.
Meanwhile, over at ClickZ, Stefan talks about what the ISPs want from you and how to find the information online.

Slow Server

Sorry about the slowness, this server is the same one that is hosting thewholeinternet.wordtothewise.com and it got posted to digg today.
If the traffic storm keeps up for more than a day or two we’ll make other arrangements for the blog.

Relevancy, yet again

Email Insider has another post discussing how important relevancy is to getting email delivered.

Busy Busy.

Getting ready to head to MAAWG next week. We leave for the plane in a couple hours. I expect there will be some interesting information coming out of the talks and sessions and will be sharing some of the more interesting bits throughout the week.
Also, Steve has written a new tool to visualize blacklists. He’s put up a beta version. It still has a few bugs and missing features, but there are already some interesting patterns in XBL data with it.
The demo installation only displays XBL data (rather than letting you overlay multiple datasets) and is missing search and bookmarking, amongst other things. Enough disclaimers yet?

More on Truthout

Ken Magill comments on the reaction of truthout.org to being blocked by AOL and Hotmail.
I do agree with Al, if both AOL and Hotmail are blocking your email, then you’re doing something wrong.

419 … over live chat?

MailChimp’s customer service people were contacted by what appears to be a King selling monkeys.
I want to get permission part II up today, but this was just so funny I had to share.

Consent and laws

Derek Harding wrote an article at ClickZ talking about consent and how the email marketing industry hasn’t yet learned that consent is important.