What makes the best email filter? There isn’t really a single answer to that question. Different people and different organizations have different tolerances for how false positives versus false negatives. For instance, we’re quite sensitive to false positives here, so we run extremely conservative filtering and don’t block very much at the MTA level. Other people I know are...
As I’ve said before, I can usually tell when some ISP changes their filtering algorithm because I start getting tons and tons of calls about delivery problems at that ISP. This past month it’s been Gmail. There have been two symptoms I’ve been hearing about. One is an increase in bulk folder delivery for mail that previously was reliably hitting the inbox. The other is a bit...
It’s a problem anyone who has done any delivery work has faced. There’s a client who is having blocklist problems or ISP delivery problems and they won’t pay any attention to what you say. They insist that you talk to the blocklist or the ISP or hand over contacts directly so they can “dialog with” someone internally. They don’t like what they’re hearing...
I made that joke the other night and most of the folks who heard it didn’t get the reference. It made me feel just a little bit old. Anyhow, Mickey beat me to it and posted much of what I was going to say about Ken Magill’s response to a very small quote from Neil’s guest post on expiring email headers last week. I, too, was at that meeting, and at many other meetings where...
A couple things related to the intersection of email and law happened recently. The 6th circuit court ruled that the government must have a search warrant before accessing email. The published opinion is interesting reading, not just because of the courts ruling on the law but also because of the defendant. Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals toyed with spamming to advertise their product as a brief...
Following on from last weeks post about MAAWG, I thought I’d write a bit about actually going to MAAWG. You’re an ESP and you’ve been accepted into the organization. Now you have some decisions to make. Who should go to MAAWG from your company? Send at least one person from your compliance or abuse desk. At the very, very least send someone who sets your policies. Don’t...
There seems to be this great misunderstanding among a huge number of email marketers and delivery professionals that MAAWG is some sort of marketing or marketing related conference. They’re wrong. MAAWG is the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group. The intention of the group is to provide a setting where companies providing internet services can work together to stop abuse. Email is one of the...
I’m putting together a longer analysis of the Holomaxx case that will look at the claims against the various defendants. There’s some deep mis-understanding of how various things works (hint: wiretapping? not so much). There was one comment from “The Other Barry” about complaints that I think bears highlighting. Silly people. High complaints means filters need to be more...
Terry Zink has a more detailed post on some of the spammer arrests and takedowns that have happened recently. In addition to the events I mentioned yesterday, authorities arrested an Armenian man suspected of running the Bredolab botnet. Unfortunately, the arrest has not stopped the spam with the malware payload. These are issues that many ISP abuse and postmaster desks deal with on a daily basis...
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...
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