There are a lot of things all of us in the deliverability, abuse and blocklist space have heard, over and over and over again. They’re so common they’re running jokes in the industry. These phrases are used by spammers, but a lot of non-spammers seem to use them as well. The most famous is probably “I’m sure they’ll unblock me if I can just explain my business model...
The acquisition of email service providers continues. Last week Deluxe (yes, the check printing people) acquired Vertical Response. This appears to be positioning themselves to improve their collection of business services to include email marketing.
It used to be when I’d send in a complaint to an ESP, I’d want them to take it seriously. To actually fix their customer problems. To stop their customers from spamming. To fix the broken process that resulted in their customer thinking I asked for email. These days? These days I just want the ESP to suppress my address and make the mail stop. Even better would be suppressing the...
Campaign Monitor contacted me about yesterday’s post. The phrasing I picked out of the spammers AUP matched their AUP quite closely. In fact, if you plug the AUP into Google, Campaign Monitor comes up as one of the first hits. It was not Campaign Monitor I was talking about. In fact, the ESP I received the mail from is not on the first 8 pages of Google hits for the phrases I posted. A...
One of the things that is most frustrating to me about sending in spam reports is that many ESPs and senders don’t actively monitor their abuse address. A few months ago I talked about getting spam from Dell to multiple email addresses of mine. What I didn’t talk about was how badly broken the ESP was in handling my complaint. The ESP was, like many ESPs, an organization that grew...
It’s been about a year since people started publicly talking about spear phishing attacks against ESPs and major emailers. There was a lot of energy put into talking about how to protect against future attacks. I have to wonder, though, how much of that talk translated into action? What processes do you have in place to protect your company against attacks? If you’re at an ESP, do you...
I often get clients and potential clients asking me to tell them what the absolute best ESP is. “You’re an expert in the field, which ESP will give me the best inbox delivery?” The thing is, there isn’t an answer to that question. ESPs have expertise in sending large amounts of mail. All have staff that manage and monitor MTAs. Most have staff that provide advice on...
As has been announced across the email industry, Whatcounts has acquired Blue Sky Factory.
This morning I received the first two spams to the address of mine that was compromised during the Epsilon compromise back in April. Actually, I received two of them. One was the “standard” Adobe phish email. The other was similar but referenced Limewire instead of Adobe. Have you heard the big news? Limewire has shut down for good. Want to know what other people are using as their...
There has been an ongoing, concerted attack against ESPs recently. Today ReturnPath published some of what is known about the attack. This is an organized, deliberate, and destructive attack clearly intent on gaining access to industry-grade email deployment systems. Further, the potential consequences should ESP client mailing lists be compromised at this time of the year is unimaginable. If you...
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