Happy July! We are back from another wonderful M3AAWG conference and enjoyed seeing many of you in Dublin. It’s always so great for us to connect with our friends, colleagues, and readers in person. I took a few notes on Michel van Eeten’s keynote on botnets, and congratulated our friend Rodney Joffe on winning the prestigious Mary Litynski Award. In anti-spam news, June brought announcements of...
Xmission, a Utah ISP, has filed suit against 3 companies alleging violations of CAN SPAM. The cases were filed in the Utah District Court in April and June. I’ve downloaded some of the documents and complaints and they are now in RECAP. I’ve also included the complaints here (and the links from here on out are almost all .pdfs of the court documents). Xmission v. Adknowledge (Case...
I get a LOT of spam here. Most of it is marked and trivial to get rid of. Some of it is what I would call semi-legitimate. It’s a real product, but I never asked to receive any information from this company and am not actually part of their demographic. For one time things I just hit delete and move on. Life is too short to complain or opt out of every spam I get. (Tried that, got more...
Update: As of mid-morning pacific time on 10/7 yahoo.com has been removed from the FCC list. As part of CAN SPAM the FCC maintains a list of wireless domains that require proof of permission to send mail to. Recently, various email folks noticed that yahoo.com was added to this list. According to the law, senders have 30 days to meet the permission standards for any recipients at domains on the...
Things are extremely busy here so blogging is not getting quite the attention it should. I hope to return to more extensive posts soon. Meanwhile, you’ll have to put up with short posts. Today is a disclaimer I received in a spam. This is one of my addresses that has, somehow, ended up on UK-specific lists. Disclaimer: “Note:- We are not spammer. We found your email through manually...
One of the marketing solutions to the spam problem is just to have recipients opt out. We think that commercial e-mail should always — and I emphasize always — provide for a way for the consumer to say: “I don’t want to hear from you again. One bite of the apple is enough. Having heard from you, I don’t want you to send me email again.” So we think that the approach of...
This issue comes up repeatedly, as many people have read the CAN SPAM act and believe that CAN SPAM specifically prohibits sending mail to harvested address. This is not how I read the law. The FTC publishes a CAN SPAM Compliance Guide for Businesses that only mentions harvesting in the context of criminal penalties for violations. They list the following 7 main requirements of CAN SPAM. Don’t...
Two different people on two different mailing lists asked very similar questions recently. Are people who send individual prospecting emails required to comply with CAN SPAM. My opinion (not a lawyer, don’t play one on TV, didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn last night) is that CAN SPAM does not mention anything about volume, and any individual unsolicited email that has a “primary...
I’ve seen lots of opinions over the last few weeks about whether or not the new ads in the Gmail promotions tab are email or not. Google is using its latest inbox redesign to stick ads in the holiest of places: Right inside your Gmail inbox. Under the promotions tab — one of three sections in the new tabbed version of Gmail — Google has started sticking ads disguised as emails, as first...
One of the features of the new Gmail tabbed inbox is email-like ads placed by Gmail. When you click on an ad, it opens up into a new window, behaving very similarly to an email. People can even forward the email to another person. This new ad type and the placement in the promotions tab has generated a lot of discussion on a number of different things related to email, abuse and spam. Is this an...
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