CategoryBest Practices

November 20, 2013

Holiday mailing advice from mailbox providers

By laura

1 Min read

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20November

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...

November 18, 2013

Don't unsubscribe from spam!!

By laura

3 Min read

7 comments

18November

Having been around the email and anti-spam industry for a while, I’ve just about seen and heard it all. In fact, sometimes I’ve been around for the beginning of the myth. One myth that seems to never actually go away is “unsubscribing just confirms you’re a real address and your address will get sold and your spam load will explode.” This is related but orthogonal to...

November 13, 2013

Yahoo now auctioning domain names

By laura

2 Min read

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13November

This summer Yahoo shook up the email ecosystem by publicly announcing they were recycling usernames. The shakeup wasn’t so much that they were recycling usernames, but that they did it in a way that compromised user information and account security. Any user that had an account tied to a recycled Yahoo account is at risk for having their PII leaked. Folks are still dealing with the fallout...

November 4, 2013

Tor cleans up their lists

By laura

1 Min read

3 comments

04November

Recently I got an email from Tor. Apparently they’re watching their opens and clicks and they noticed I hadn’t loaded any images recently. We notice you haven’t opened the Tor.com newsletter in a while, and that’s okay: we know you’re busy. That’s why we create our newsletter from scratch each week, to highlight the articles we think you’ll love and round...

October 28, 2013

Posts and articles about the DMA spamming

By laura

1 Min read

1 comment

28October

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

October 28, 2013

What not to do when buying lists

By laura

4 Min read

1 comment

Saturday morning I check my mail and notice multiple emails from the DMA. Yes, I got three copies of an email from the US Direct Marketing Association with the subject line Kick It Up A Notch With The DMA Career Center. It seems the DMA are buying addresses from various companies. Because I use tagged email addresses, this means their naive de-duping doesn’t realize that laura-x and laura-y...

October 25, 2013

… until it stops moving

By steve

1 Min read

1 comment

25October

Nothing is impossible to kill. It’s just that sometimes after you kill something you have to keep shooting it until it stops moving.Mira Grant, Feed It’s getting to the time of year when I can get away with some horror movie metaphors. Today, things that are dead. 1. ADSP ADSP was a domain repudiation scheme that should never really have lived, but thankfully it’s now dead. If...

October 15, 2013

Is it real or is it spam?

By laura

5 Min read

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15October

The wanted but unexpected email is one of the major challenges facing ISPs and filter developers. If there was never any need or desire for people to receive email from someone they don’t know, then mail clients could be locked down to only accept mail from addresses on a whitelist. It wouldn’t completely solve the spam problem, for a number of reasons, but it would lessen the...

October 9, 2013

On Discovery and Email

By steve

4 Min read

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09October

If you’re involved in any sort of civil legal action in the US Courts – whether that be claims of patent violation, defamation, sexual harassment or anything else – there’s a point in the pre-trial process where the opposing lawyers can request information from you, and also from any third-parties they believe may have useful information. This phase is called Discovery. US...

October 2, 2013

Losing friends and influencing people

By laura

2 Min read

2 comments

02October

I download a lot of ESP white papers. Not because I’m looking for an ESP, but because I think it’s important to know what’s happening in the industry and what topics people think are important. I understand fully that white papers are a lead generation tool and I can expect followup from sales people at the places I download papers from. This is all well and good. Generally the...