On May 31, British broadband provider EE discontinued service for a number of email domains: Orange.net, Orangehome.co.uk, Wanadoo.co.uk, Freeserve.co.uk, Fsbusiness.co.uk, Fslife.co.uk, Fsmail.net, Fsworld.co.uk, and Fsnet.co.uk. These domains were acquired by EE as part of multiple mergers and acquisitions. On their help page, EE explains that the proliferation of free email services with...
I recently received a 419 spam that had a message at the top of the email. Yup, a 419 spammer is trying to convince me there are millions of dollars waiting for me, but he won’t pay his software vendor 29.99 to comply with a license. This is only the most recent in a long line of examples of spammers being cheap and attempting to steal services. Back when I was working abuse almost every...
Phishing is an online threat that’s been around for more than 20 years. I initially heard of it in relation to spammers taking over an AOL account to send out spam. These days phis is more dangerous and more sophisticated. Phishing is not just used to send spam. It’s used to take over elections; it’s used to steal millions of dollars. Experts estimate that globally phishing...
Using unique addresses for signups gives me the ability to track how well companies are protecting customer data. If only one company ever had an address, and it’s now getting spam or phishing mail, then that company has had a data breach. The challenge then becomes getting the evidence and details to the right people inside the company. In one case it was easy. I knew a number of people...
April was a big travel month for us. I went to Las Vegas for meetings around the Email Innovations Summit and to New Orleans, where Steve spoke on the closing keynote panel for the EEC conference. I wrote several posts this month about privacy and tracking, both in email and in other online contexts. It’s increasingly a fact of life that our behaviors are tracked, and I wrote about the need for...
Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending my first ESPC semi-annual meeting. I was scheduled to talk on a panel about list hygiene with a couple vendors. Because some folks didn’t make it, I also sat on the panel talking about blocklists. It was a fun day. I got to meet and talk with some colleagues I haven’t seen in an age. And I met some new faces and had interesting interactions...
One of the questions I get from folks about delivery is what the optimal text to image ratio there should be in an email. I’ll be honest, I hate this question. Why? Because the question is actually irrelevant. I’ve seen companies with a single image and no text get to the inbox. I’ve seen companies with no images get to the inbox. The text to image ratio is not going to make or...
We’ll be in New Orleans next week for the EEC conference. Steve will be on the closing keynote panel taking about subscription bombing. Say hi! while you’re there!
Happy Friday!
“I can’t believe you are wearing one of those,” they said while sneering at the Pebble watch I was wearing. Yes, that’s how someone introduced themselves to me at a conference last year. Apparently, I’m not allowed to wear smartwatches, or something. It wasn’t clear what their problem was or why they thought that was a good opening line. Best I can figure, it...
On Sunday the NYTimes published an article about Uber’s CEO. One of the pieces of information that came out of that article is services like unroll.me sell information they scrape out of emails sent to their users. Uber devoted teams to so-called competitive intelligence, purchasing data from an analytics service called Slice Intelligence. Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll...
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