Taganti-spammers

The Blighty Flag

Back in the dark ages (the late ’90s) most people used dialup to connect to the internet. Those people who had broadband could run all sorts of services off them, including websites and mail servers and such. We had a cable modem for a while handling mail for blighty.com. At that time blighty.com had an actual website. This site hosted some of the very first online tools for fighting abuse...

June 2016: The Month in Email

We’re officially halfway through 2016, and looking forward to a slightly less hectic month around here. I hope you’re enjoying your summer (or winter, for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere).     Our first June blog post marked the fifteen year anniversary of the very first anti-spam conference, SpamCon. As I noted, many of the people at that conference are still working in the...

Typo traps

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...

Don't unsubscribe from spam!!

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...

Are you sure? Part 2

There was a bit of discussion about yesterday’s blog post over on my G+ circles. One person was telling me that “did you forget you opted-in?” was a perfectly valid question. He also commented he’s had the same address for 20 years and that he does, sometimes forget he opted in to mail years ago. As an anti-spammer with the idea that it’s all about consent, I can see...

Blocklists, delisting and extortion

As I’m sure many of you have heard by now there is a new blocklist called ‘nszones.’ This blocklist is apparently stealing data from a number of other publicly accessible blocklists, combining the data and then charging folks for delisting. This is a scam attempting to extort money from people. The blocklist has no way to actually remove IPs from the parent zones and I’m...

Define "spam"

A comment came through recently from Trent asking me to define spam. It’s been a while since I’ve talked about how I define spam, so let’s look at it. Personally, I describe spam as unsolicited bulk email. If I didn’t ask for it and it looks like bulk mail then I consider it spam. In many cases the spammers have multiple email addresses of mine so I can demonstrate the...

More Gordon v. Virtumundo news

Eric Goldman reviews the appeals court decision in Gordon vs. Virtumundo. This case is exceedingly interesting and important because it destroys the arguments of anti-spam plaintiffs trying to manufacture technical violations of CAN-SPAM for their profit. Not only does the opinion send an unmistakable message to the lower courts to toss these plaintiffs out on their keister, but it sends the...

9th circuit ruling in Gordon v. Virtumundo

The 9th circuit court of appeals issued their ruling in Gordon v. Virtumundo today. The ruling was heavily in favor of Virtumundo. I have not had time to read the ruling, but both Venkat and Mickey have posts on the case and the ruling. This is another solid blow against anti-spammers suing spammers under state laws and CAN SPAM. The problem is that many of the cases are brought by people, and...

Double opt-in, it's not what you think it is

Bill McCloskey has a post over on ClickZ about single opt-in vs. double opt-in. The post itself is generating a lot of buzz in the industry and has pages and pages of comments. I’m not going to really comment on the post, as I think much of what I would say has been covered in the comments, in posts here and in every email marketing discussion that has happened in the last 5 years. I do...

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