Mention an email is spam to some senders and watch them dance around trying to explain all the ways they aren’t spammers. At some point, calling an email spam seems to have gone from a statement of fact into some sort of moral judgement on the sender. But calling an email spam is not a moral judgement. It’s just a statement of what a particular recipient thinks of an email. There are...
How do you contact an ISP about a block that doesn’t have a postmaster page? While there’s no one answer, I do have some suggestions. Start by contacting the postmaster@ or abuse@ addresses. For smaller ISPs, the same people handling outbound abuse are the people handling inbound filtering. When you contact them have the following: What IPs you’re sending from. What the...
Some email blacklists focus solely on allowing their users to block mail from problematic sources. Others aim to reduce the amount of bad mail sent and prefer senders clean up their practices, rather than just blocking them wholesale. The Spamhaus SBL is one of the second type, using listings both to block mail permanently from irredeemable spammers and as short term encouragement for a sender to...
Courtesy of Spencer over at Experian.
The 5 Stages of Recovery
I have gotten a lot of questions about Spamhaus since I’ve been talking about them on the blog and on various mailing lists. Those questions can be condensed and summed up into a single thought. What engagement metrics should I monitor to avoid a Spamhaus listing? First off Spamhaus doesn’t care about about engagement. Spamhaus wants you to stop mailing people who never asked to...
It seems some mail to Apple’s iCloud has been caught in filters. Apparently, a few months ago someone sent a script to a iCloud user that contained the phrase “barely legal teen” and Apple’s filters ate it. The amount of hysteria that I’ve seen in some places about this, though, seems excessive. One of my favorite quotes was from MacWorld and just tells me that many...
A number of ESPs are reporting an increase in SBL listings of big, well known brands. InterestingSBLs seems to confirm this. Just on the month of June I see tweets reporting SBL listings for: Disney (again, and again) AAA Michigan, NRCC, the Mitt Romney campaign, Macy’s (again) Facebook, Walmart Brazil, Safeway, Bacardi. What happened? I think there are a number of reasons for an increase...
There’s a company that advertises a lot on TV. The ads are well done, they tell a clear story in the 30 seconds. They feature a pretty and happy young woman dancing around. There is a great catchy tune. From all appearances it’s a successful ad campaign. The point of the ad campaign is to drive traffic to a website where the domain owner can collect a lot of information and sell it on...
There was a recent question on a mailing list during a discussion of spam and delivery problems. A number of folks who work in delivery were discussing how a bad address got on a list. Someone who works on the spam blocking end of things asked why do you care how a bad address got onto a mailing list? For recipients, they usually don’t care. They just want the unsolicited mail to stop...
Yesterday’s post was inspired by a number of questions I’ve fielded recently from people in the email industry. Some were clients, some were colleagues on mailing lists, but in most cases they’d found a delivery issue that they couldn’t solve and were looking for the elusive Human Representative of an ISP. There was a time when having a contact inside an ISP was almost...
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