For a long time one of the “best practices” for links in html content has been to avoid having anything that looks like a URL or hostname in the visible content of the link, as ISP phishing filters are very, very suspicious of links that seem to mislead recipients about where the link goes to. They’re a very common pattern in phishing emails. /* This is bad: */ <a href="">>...
A number of folks in the sender space are reporting intermittent “This link may be suspicious” warnings on their emails. I first heard about it a few weeks ago from some clients. One wasn’t sure what was going on, the other found a bunch of malware uploaded into their customer accounts. At least 3 people have mentioned it today. One of them asked on Mailop, and the couple Google...
The email solicitation that made me vow to never work with this company again. When sending unsolicited email, you never know how the recipient is going to respond. Writing a public blog post calling you out can happen. The 2016 Sparkies. Sparkpost is looking for nominations for their email marketing awards. Win a trip to Insight 2016! 5 CAN SPAM myths. Send Grid’s General Counsel speaks...
I received this email earlier this week, an email that I wanted but this is how it arrived. The email contained a single image link, a text line of who the message was sent to, the senders name, address, and finally an unsubscribe link. Good news, the email is CAN-SPAM compliant! Bad news, I have no idea what the content of the message is and it looks somewhat spammy. The email was sent to my...
Chattanooga area payday lender Carey V. Brown lays off workers
Earlier this month I mentioned that a number of people were seeing issues with multiple links in emails being clicked by Barracuda filters. I invited readers to contact me and provide me with any information or evidence they had. Not only did a number of senders contact me, but one of the support reps at Barracuda also contacted me. At issue is a part of the Barracuda email filter call the intent...
A number of people have asked me recently if I know anything about appliances clicking all the links in emails. Some of those people have asked specifically about Barracuda, some have just asked if I knew of any filters that clicked links. The answer is, yes, there are cases where spam filters have followed all the links in an email. One of the filters that I know has done this in the past is...
Thanks to tips by a couple blog readers and some clients, I have been looking into Yahoo disabling links in the bulk folder. It does appear Yahoo is no longer allowing users to click on links in emails that Yahoo places in the bulk folder. In fact, some of the spam in my Yahoo mailbox even has a notice about this. One of the interesting questions I’ve gotten about this is how it affects...
Last week Return Path announce a new set of email intelligence products. One of their new products offers customers the chance to actually see how (some subset of) their customer base interacts with mail directly. It moves beyond simply looking at probe mailboxes and actually looks inside the mailbox of recipients. Spamhaus has listed bit.ly on the Domain Blocklist (DBL) for allowing spammers to...
Last week a federal judge ruled a blogger, Crystal Cox, was not a journalist and not subject to first amendment protections. I haven’t been following the case very closely, but was a little concerned about the precedent and the liability for people like me who blog. Reading some of the articles on the case, though, I’m less worried. This isn’t a blogger making some statements...
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