Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5 Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links I’ve been stage-managing for a production of The Nutcracker this week, so musical terminology is on my mind. In opera, the intermezzo is a comedic interlude between acts of an opera series. This comedic interlude is about the “DDoS” – a distributed denial of service...
Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5 Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links Yesterday I talked about GFI responsiveness to queries and delisting requests about SORBS listings. Today I’m going to look at data accuracy. The two issues are tightly intertwined – a blacklist that isn’t responsive to reports of false positive listings will end up with a...
Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5 Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links A little over a year ago the SORBS blacklist was purchased by GFI Software. I had fairly high hopes that it would improve significantly, start behaving with some level of professionalism and competence and become a useful data source, in much the same way that the SpamCop blacklist turned...
My post “We’re going to party like it’s 1996” is still getting a lot of comments from people. Based on the comments, either people aren’t reading or my premise wasn’t clear. Back in 1996 the first lawsuits were brought against ISPs to stop ISPs from blocking email. These suits were failures. Since that time, other senders have attempted to sue ISPs and lost...
I often get a chuckle out of watching some people, who are normally on the blocking end of the delivery equation, struggle through their own blocking issues. A recent situation came up on a mailing list where someone who has very vehement opinions about how to approach her particular blocklist for delisting and that the lists policies are immutable. The company she works for is having some...
A spam filter looks at many things when it’s deciding whether or not to deliver a message to the recipients inbox, usually divided into two broad categories – the behaviour of the sender and the content of the message. When we talk about sender behaviour we’ll often dive headfirst into the technical details of how that’s monitored and tracked – history of mail from...
Over on deliverability.com Dela Quist has a long blog post up talking about how changes to Hotmail and Gmail’s priority inbox are a class action suit waiting to happen. All I can say is that it’s all been tried before. Cyberpromotions v. AOL started the ball rolling when they tried to use the First Amendment to force AOL to accept their unsolicited email. The courts said No. Time goes...
A question came up on a mailing list about how long it typically took to resolve a spam block at an ISP. I don’t think that question actually has a single answer, as each ISP has their own, special, process. ISPA takes 5 minutes. You fill out a form, it runs through their automated system and you’re usually delisted. ISPB asks a lot of questions in their form, so it takes about 15...
Recently, an abuse desk rep asked what to do when customers were complaining about being assigned an IP address located on a blocklist. Because not every blocklist actually affects mail delivery it’s helpful to identify if the listing is causing a problem before diving in and trying to resolve the issue. Find out whether mail is actually being blocked, or whether the customer just went to...
It can be difficult and frustrating for a sender to understand they whys and wherefores of spam filtering. Clearly the sender is not spamming, so why is their mail getting caught in spam filters? I have a client that goes through this frustration on rare occasions. They send well crafted, fun, engaging content that their users really want. They have a solid reputation at the ISPs and their inbox...
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