Al has another post about another company sending mail to a customer that gave an email address that didn’t belong to them. The person receiving the misdirected email has no effective way to make it stop, and is getting more and more frustrated with the ongoing spam. (Consumerist article)
Chris from Cloudmark tracks a UK text spammer.
Now, in a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Justin Rao of Microsoft and David Reiley of Google (who met working at Yahoo) have teamed up to estimate the cost of spam to society relative to its worldwide revenues. The societal price tag comes to $20 billion. The revenue? A mere $200 million. As they note, that means that the “‘externality ratio’ of external costs...
A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about handling abuse complaints. As a bit of a throwaway I mentioned that new companies don’t always think about how their service can be abused before releasing it on the unsuspecting internet. Today’s blog post by Margot Romary at the Return Path In the Know blog reminds me that it’s not always new companies that don’t think about abuse...
There’s a certain type of sender that thinks every ISP block or email delivered to the bulk folder is a false positive. They’re so sure that the filters aren’t actually supposed to catch their mail that they’ll spend any amount of money and do every possible thing to get their mail to the inbox. The problem for these senders, though, is that their mail is exactly the type...
One of the things that never ceases to amaze me about phishers is how incredibly creative they can be in writing text that encourages recipients to open their emails. There have been two separate incident recently that inspired me to talk about phishing. The first was watching viruses propagate through my local neighborhood mailing list. I live in Silicon Valley and we do have an email list for...
Today is world IPv6 launch day. A group of ISPs, network hardware manufacturers and web companies permanently enabled IPv6 for their products and services. What’s this got to do with email? According to a post on the NANOG mailing list the very first email to arrive at the Comcast IPv6 mailserver was received a minute after the server was turned on. This email was spam and was caught by...
I found this article over on Hubspot, and I think it covers a lot of why people hate email marketing quite well.
Return Path have an interesting post up about content filtering. I like the model of 3 different kinds of filters, in fact it’s one I’ve been using with clients for over 18 months. Spamfiltering isn’t really about one number or one filter result, it’s a complex interaction of lots of different heuristics designed to answer the question: do recipients want this kind of mail?
Much like every other day, I got some spam today. Here’s a lightly edited copy of it. Let’s go through it and see what they did that makes it clear that it’s spam, which companies helped them out, and what you should avoid doing to avoid looking like these spammers… Received: from [213.144.59.132] (114.sub-75-210-142.myvzw.com [75.210.142.114] by m.wordtothewise.com...
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