TagBlocking

February 27, 2008

Yahoo delays, part 3: Yahoo speaks

By laura

2 Min read

5 comments

27February

Yahoo is aware of the recent problems and have been working feverishly to fix them. A Yahoo employee posted to a mailing list earlier today, explaining some of the recent issues. The summary is: 1) The Yahoo delays are a result of a tighter spam filtering policy. The delays are the result of the system erroneously recognizing email as spam and deferring delivery. They do believe that retrying...

February 6, 2008

What really is "spam" anyway?

By laura

4 Min read

3 comments

06February

A few days ago I was reading the attempt by e360 and Dave Linhardt to force Comcast to accept his mail and to stop people posting in the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email from claiming he is a spammer. The bit that pops out at me in this complaint of his, is the fact that he believes that by complying with the minimal standards of the CAN-SPAM act, he is not spamming. The problem with this...

January 16, 2008

Why do ISPs limit emails per connection?

By steve

4 Min read

6 comments

16January

A few years ago it was “common knowledge” that if you were sending large amounts of email to an ISP the most polite way to do that, the way that would put the least load on the receiving mailserver, was to open a single SMTP session to the mailserver and then to send all the mail for that ISP down that single connection. That’s because the receiving mailserver is concerned about...

January 4, 2008

Yahoo and Spamhaus

By laura

3 Min read

8 comments

04January

Yahoo has updated and modified their postmaster pages. They have also put a lot of work into clarifying their response codes. The changes should help senders identify and troubleshoot problems without relying on individual help from Yahoo. There is one major change that deserves its own discussion. Yahoo is now using the SBL, XBL and PBL to block connections from listed IP addresses. These are...

November 28, 2007

Why does everyone tell you to avoid .biz in your emails?

By steve

6 Min read

2 comments

28November

… or Why do spam filters sometimes have some very strange ideas? It’s been dogma for a long time that if you’re doing email marketing you should avoid using a .biz domain in your mails. Even if your main website was in .biz, you should use something different in your messages, perhaps a website you buy solely for use in email that redirects to your real .biz website. Last year I...

November 8, 2007

Greylisting: that which Yahoo does not do

By laura

3 Min read

3 comments

08November

Over the last couple days multiple people have asserted to me that Yahoo is greylisting mail. The fact that Yahoo itself asserts it is not using greylisting as a technique to control mail seems to have no effect on the number of people who believe that Yahoo is greylisting. Deeply held beliefs by many senders aside, Yahoo is not greylisting. Yahoo is using temporary failures (4xx) as a way to...

October 14, 2007

Blacklisted on FiveTen: no big deal

By laura

1 Min read

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14October

Al posted an analysis on DNSBL Resource about the effectiveness of the FiveTen blacklist. He says: Analysis of the raw data suggests to me that Fiveten’s poor (high) false positive rates is primarily due to Fiveten’s listing of “bulk mailers that don’t require closed loop confirmation opt-in from all their customers.” As a result, Fiveten has thousands of senders listed that...

October 3, 2007

Blocklists and standards

By laura

2 Min read

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03October

I received a comment this morning on my post about e360 v. Spamhaus, which I think brings up a point that deserves a post of it’s own. Skinny says: If spamhaus can create their own list of what Spam is or isn’t, Then what is to stop us applying this rule in the real world. A joy rider can carry a mission statement declaring that in his terms car theft is ok (a over the top compression but...

September 26, 2007

More on Truthout

By laura

1 Min read

2 comments

26September

Ken Magill comments on the reaction of truthout.org to being blocked by AOL and Hotmail.
I do agree with Al, if both AOL and Hotmail are blocking your email, then you’re doing something wrong.

September 19, 2007

They’re not blocking you because they hate you.

By laura

2 Min read

2 comments

19September

Really. They’re blocking you because you’re doing something that is triggering their blocking mechanisms. This has happened over and over and over again. Some political or activist website sends out an email that gets blocked by some large ISP and the political site turns it into a giant crisis that means the ISP hates them or is trying to shut them up or is trying to silence their message...