Yesterday we talked about social networks that harvest the address books of registered users and send mail to all those addresses on behalf of their registered user. In the specific case, the registered user did not know that the network was going to send that mail and subsequently apologized to everyone. That is not the only way social networks collect addresses. After I posted that, Steve...
The next killer ap on the Internet seems to be social networking. Everyone has a great idea for the next facebook or or myspace. All of these sites, though, have to find users. The site will fail if there are no users. One way to get new users is to ask all your current users to invite all their friends to join. This tends to lead to the marketing / product decision to insert functionality into...
Here is some advice on dealing with ISPs over a blocking issue. Do know what IP is blocked if it is an IP based block. Do know what domain is blocked if it is domain based block. Do know what the rejection message is and have it handy. Do be polite. Most of the ISPs get hundreds of contacts a day, many of which are decidedly impolite. If you are the polite one you’re much more likely to...
JD had a comment on my Valentines day semi-fluff post, that really summed up the reality for senders. He said Make sure your mail doesn’t look anything like spam — not just in the text and formatting, but in all of your mailing practices. Good advice, your mail will not be blocked if it does not look like spam. What kinds of things do I mean? Here are things that spammers do, that often non...
There comes an inevitable point in some of my longer term consulting gigs where my client asks me some version of the following question:
I still get spam in my inbox, so why is the email I send blocked?
So what is your best answer?
Over on the ET blog, Al posted about how CAN SPAM compliance is not sufficient for you to not be spamming. It’s a bit different perspective, but very complimentary to my post yesterday about what is and is not spam. He and I have both heard from ISP people about how many requests for whitelisting or unblocking are prefaced with, “We comply with CAN SPAM” and how meaningless that...
A few days ago I was reading the attempt by e360 and Dave Linhardt to force Comcast to accept his mail and to stop people posting in the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email from claiming he is a spammer. The bit that pops out at me in this complaint of his, is the fact that he believes that by complying with the minimal standards of the CAN-SPAM act, he is not spamming. The problem with this...
Russell from Port25 posted a comment on my earlier post about changes at Comcast.
Our (Port25) understanding is that Comcast is rate limiting such that they’re only accepting 6 recipients per second per sending IP.
This matches what I’ve been hearing from other bits of the industry over the last few days. I am recommending clients close the connection between each set of 6 email addresses.
Sources tell me that AOL announced on yesterday’s ESPC call that they are now, and have been for about a week, checking DKIM inbound. This fits with a conversation I had with one of the AOL delivery team a month or so back where they were asking me about what senders would be most concerned about when / if AOL started using DKIM. The other announcement is that AOL, like Yahoo, would like to...
A few years ago it was “common knowledge” that if you were sending large amounts of email to an ISP the most polite way to do that, the way that would put the least load on the receiving mailserver, was to open a single SMTP session to the mailserver and then to send all the mail for that ISP down that single connection. That’s because the receiving mailserver is concerned about...
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