This week there has been an ongoing discussion on one of my mailing lists about spam, definitions, use of the this-is-spam button and permission. One small part of the discussion centers around the definition of spam. Is spam unwanted email or is it unasked for email? If a sender doesn’t have permission from recipients to send mail, but the sender manages to keep their reputation at major...
Most ISP feedback loops require you to demonstrate that you’re really responsible for your domain before they’ll start forwarding reports to you. The usual way that works is pretty similar to a closed-loop opt-in signup for a mailing list – the ISP sends an email with a link in it to the abuse@ and postmaster@ aliases for your domain, and you need to click the link in one or...
There has been a very long, ongoing discussion on one of my mailing lists about whether or not feedback loops are a net good or a net harm. I believe, overall, they are a net good, but there are people who believe they are not. The biggest objection is that the lawyer mandated redaction of the To: address combined with the fact that some users use the “this is spam” button to delete...
Last week a major player in the botnet arena was taken offline when they were shutdown by their upstream provider. With the demise of McColo, there has been a 30 – 50% drop in the amount of spam as measured by any number of different techniques. The CBL team has posted an article about their view of the McColo disconnection, which includes links to press articles about the shutdown...
I recently received an email from someone I do not know. This email was welcoming me to the friends and family beta of a new website. This email got under my skin a bit and it has been one of those weeks and so I decided to reply to the email. “Whomever sold you this email address lied to you,” says I. I did not point out all the reasons I know this, including the two @home.com...
Yesterday, on an ESPC call, Mike Adkins of AOL announced upcoming changes to the AOL reputation system. As part of these changes, AOL will be checking DKIM on the inbound. Best estimates are that this will be deployed in the first half of 2009, possibly in Q1. This is something AOL has been hinting at for most of 2008. As part of this, AOL has deployed an address where any sender can check the...
Ken Magill, celebrity, has two articles today that highlight the issue with buying lists from vendors. The first is yet another article about EmailAppenders selling bad data. In this case, it is not the buyers who are complaining. According to Ken EmailAppenders are sending out email advertising they can sell Internet Retailer’s list of 2008 conference attendees. Internet Retailer is disputing...
My mailbox and IM windows have been swamped with messages about an ISP sending out mail to participants in their FBL program. It seems this particular ISP could use some delivery consulting. See, this ISP sent out emails with blocks of 50 – 75 email addresses in the To: line. Bad idea. Delivery wise, I do not expect that they had many delivery problems. In the copy I saw, most of the...
Yesterday, I posted about reputation as a combination of measurable statistics, like bounce rates and complaint rates and spamtrap hits. But some mailers who meet those reputation numbers are still seeing some delivery problems. When they ask places, like AOL, why their mail is being put into the bulk folder or blocked they are told that the issue is their reputation. This leads to confusion on...
Reputation is the buzzword in delivery these days. Everyone talks about building a good reputation and how to do it. Makes sense, the ISPs are always hammering on reputation and how critical reputation is. The more I talk with delivery folks on the ESP side of thing, the move I realize that there is a fundamental disconnect between what the ESPs mean when they say reputation and what the ISPs...
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