MySpace has won a 234 million dollar judgment against Walt Rines and Sanford Wallace. “MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on our site,” [MySpace Chief Privacy officer] Nigam said in a statement. “We remain committed to punishing those who violate the law and try to harm our members.” These are two of the spammers responsible for me learning...
Ken has a followup to his article last week about the EEC spamming. Multiple e-mails obtained by this newsletter clearly show VIV was prospecting the EEC member list from its servers in violation of the EEC’s own privacy policy. […] Moreover, one reader sent this newsletter two separate free issues of two different editions of VIV that were spammed into his inbox on two different days. So...
Chris Marriott over at iMediaConnection talks about all the reasons email is a non-starter as a replacement for direct mail. This is something I have been telling clients for a while now. Chris mentions a number of reasons for why email is not an acquisition tool. Today, banks can flood your mailbox with all the credit card offers they want, but they can’t flood your email box with the same...
Ben over at MailChimp has an article talking about a recent experience with Postini and an actual bug that causes Postini to interact badly with another spamfilter and block non-spam.
Al wrote a post commenting on my post from last Thursday on spamfilters talking to senders who are being filtered. I think his take on it is close to mine. I would point out that Google has a pretty opaque system and no feedback to senders, but a lot of people seem to think their filters are accurate and do a good job. Overall, I think there is room for discussion and feedback between senders and...
JD posed a question in my post about Postini and trying to sort out a customer getting marked as spam by their filtering mechanism and I think it bears more discussion than can be done in comments. And sure, it’s a best practice for filtering companies to respond politely to requests from filterees. But is it a requirement? Do senders have a right to demand explanations? There is not really an...
Mail from one of my clients is being filtered at Postini and they asked me to look into this. Not that there is anything that can be done, of course. Even before they were bought out by Google, they were the poster child for a spam filtering company that believed they could do no wrong. It was difficult, if not impossible to get a straight answer from Postini about filtering, and the only...
Recently there has been a massive uptick in forgeries. I have been seeing hundreds of bounce back messages, peaking at more than 1000 in an hour. I have been talking about this with people who monitor large spamtrap feeds, large MTAs and spamfilters and it seems this is not an isolated experience. The consensus seems to be that there is new spamware out there which is using email addresses on the...
Here is some advice on dealing with ISPs over a blocking issue. Do know what IP is blocked if it is an IP based block. Do know what domain is blocked if it is domain based block. Do know what the rejection message is and have it handy. Do be polite. Most of the ISPs get hundreds of contacts a day, many of which are decidedly impolite. If you are the polite one you’re much more likely to...
Many of my clients come to me when they end up with delivery problems due to the actions of affiliates. These can either be listings in some of the URL blocklists (either public or private) or escalations of IP based listings. In many of the cases I have dealt with affiliates, the affiliates have sloppy mailing practices or are out and out spammers. Recently the FTC settled with Cyberheat over...
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