A code glitch in a new DBL sub-zone known as 'Abused-Legit' caused the new Abused-Legit zone to list ".net." for 60 minutes from 08:35 UTC. — Spamhaus (@spamhaus) December 17, 2014 Spamhaus are rolling out a new subzone of the DBL, for domains whose webservers have been compromised and used to host spam landing pages, often via mass compromises of their management control...
At the recent Sendgrid Emailmatter’s conference Sally Lehman advised attendees to “Treat someone’s inbox like it was their home.” This is advice I’ve been giving clients for a long time. I think it’s even more relevant now as so many people have data enabled phones and are checking email so frequently. It’s not just their home, it’s their personal...
I frequently get clients telling me that they have about 15 (20, 30) major domains on their list, and then a long tail of domains with only a couple of recipients. If you sort simply by the left hand side of the @, that’s true. When you’re sending email, it’s not just the domain in the email address that is important. Of equal importance is the MX. The MX is what actually...
A comment came through on my post about unsubscribing that helpfully told me that the problem was I didn’t unsubscribe correctly. As you know, there are usually two unsubscribe options in many of the bulk senders emails. Are you unsubscribing from the global or the offer unsub? Unless you are unsubscribing from both, you will still be on the lists. To address the underlying question, I did...
At the end of last year, I talked a little bit about a project I was working on to see if unsubscribing from spam would actually work. The address I picked was my first non-work/school related email address. It’s been mine since 2004 or so. I stopped using it for anything commerce related back in the late 90s. But it is on a lot of address lists (as it was used to post to Usenet), and a lot...
Things are extremely busy here and blogging is going to be light for a few weeks. I’ll be reposting some older blog posts that are still relevant for today’s email senders. Today’s post is a repost from July 2009. I discuss why recipients complain about mail and how senders can lower the complaint rates. While this addresses complaint rates directly, the same series of questions...
People make all sorts of claims about typo traps. One claim that showed up recently was that Spamhaus has just started using typo traps. I asked my Facebook network when people started using typos to detect incoming spam. Two different colleagues mentioned using typos, both on the left hand side and the right hand side, back in ’98 and ’99. The point is, typo traps are absolutely...
I’ve given Humble Bundle my (tagged) email address a bunch of times – as part of purchases, as my username on their website, to download games and books I’ve bought. And, naturally, they’ve sent me newsletters announcing when they have new sales. Did I check a checkbox or uncheck a checkbox? I don’t remember, and don’t really care. It’s a company I have a...
One of the things our bank does that I really like is send ATM receipts directly to the email address associated with the ATM card. No more random pieces of paper I have to track down, it’s all there in my mailbox. This week I noticed that the bank is leveraging the transactional mail to tell me about new services they provide. I think this is awesome. I get my receipt and I get to learn...
What are affiliate mailers? Affiliate mailers collect email addresses and then rent access to those addresses out to 3rd parties. There are a wide range of vendors that fall into the affiliate category. Some vendors compile lists through co-registration, others compile lists themselves through website opt-ins and some affiliate vendors fulfill mailing requests by hiring affiliates. There are, of...
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