My post “We’re going to party like it’s 1996” is still getting a lot of comments from people. Based on the comments, either people aren’t reading or my premise wasn’t clear. Back in 1996 the first lawsuits were brought against ISPs to stop ISPs from blocking email. These suits were failures. Since that time, other senders have attempted to sue ISPs and lost...
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...
I’ve watched a couple discussions around the email and anti-spam community recently with a bit of awe. It seems many email marketers are admitting they are powerless to actually implement all the good advice they give to others. They are admitting they can’t persuade, cajole, influence or pressure their companies to actually follow best practices. Some of the comments public and...
MessageLabs released their monthly report on email threats yesterday. Many media outlets picked up and reported that 41% of spam was from a the Rustock botnet. Other highlights from the report include: Spam accounts for over 92% of all email. 95% of spam was sent from botnets at the end of July 2010. One in 327 emails contains malware and one in 363 emails is a phish. The number of rustock...
Today’s been chock full of phone calls and dealing with clients, but I did happen to notice a bunch of people having small herds of cows because Spamhaus listed www.gmail.com on the SBL. “SPAMHAUS BLOCKS GOOGLE!!!” the headlines scream. My own opinion is that Google doesn’t do enough to police their network and their users, and that a SBL listing isn’t exactly a...
David Spinks asks on twitter: Should you ever contact someone who made an abuse complaint about your newsletter to find out why My answer was: It depends, but it’s too complicated to explain in 140 characters. I don’t suggest responding to people who hit the “this is spam” button as a way of complaining. FBLs are complaints, but they are people who don’t necessarily...
I was cleaning out my spam folder this afternoon. I try and do it at least once a day, otherwise the volume gets so bad I don’t actually look at the mail I just mark it all as read. I realized, though, that spamfilters are actually a marketer’s best friend. If there were no spam filters keeping all the crap people get out of their inbox (in my case over 1000 messages a day) then spam...
I called out David Williams from appendleads.com yesterday for his spam. Sure he’s a spammer, his database is full of garbage information and his email violates CAN SPAM but he’s not that unusual in the realm of list sellers. He is very typical of the people I see offering lists for sale. List sellers are the internet version of used car salesmen. Everyone knows they are slimy sales...
One of my email addresses at a client got spammed today offering to sell me appending services. I was going to post the email here and point out all of the problems in how he was advertising it, including violating CAN SPAM. As I often do, I plugged his phone number into google, only to discover that my blog post from March about this spammer was the 2nd hit for that number. Well, go me. I can...
CampaignMonitor blogged today about an email they sent out that triggered the Thunderbird “this might be a scam” filter. After a bit of tweaking, we discovered that Thunderbird systematically throws up this alert when it sees a URLs in your HTML email copy. In this case, we had made the mistake of adding the following line: If you would like to support the National Wildlife Federation...
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