John Levine has a longer blog post about the Smith vs. Comcast suit. Be sure to read the comment from Terry Zink about the MS related claims.
May 17, 2010
About that spam suit
17May
May 14, 2010
The secret to fixing delivery problems
14May
There is a persistent belief among some senders that the technical part of sending email is the most important part of delivery. They think that by tweaking things around the edges, like changing their rate limiting and refining bounce handling, their email will magically end up in the inbox. This is a gross misunderstanding of the reasons for bulk foldering and blocking by the ISPs. Yes...
April 19, 2010
What Happens Next…
19April
or Why All Of This Is Meaningless: Guest post by Huey Callison The analysis of the AARP spam was nice, but looking at the Mainsleaze Spammer Playbook, I can make a few educated guesses at what happens next: absolutely nothing of consequence. AARP, if they acknowledge this publicly (I bet not) has plausible deniability and can say “It wasn’t us, it was an unscrupulous lead-gen...
April 14, 2010
Spam from mainstream companies
14April
Yesterday I wrote about spam I received advertising AARP and used it as an example of a mainstream group supporting spammers by hiring them (or hiring them through proxies) to send mail on their behalf. My statement appears to have upset someone, though. There is one comment on the post, coming from an IP address allocated to the AARP. This isn’t from AARP…this is a SPAM that’s been going around...
April 13, 2010
Did anyone actually look at this email before sending?
13April
I received spam advertising AARP recently. Yes, AARP. Oh, of course they didn’t send me spam, they hired someone who probably hired someone who contracted with an affiliate marketer to send mail. The affiliates, while capable of bypassing spam filters, are incapable of actually sending readable mail. That’s actually how the message appeared in my mail client: totally unreadable images...
April 12, 2010
More on opt-out for B2B marketing
12April
There is still a bit of discussion going on around the HBR article on how B2B mail should be opt-out not opt in on various delivery blogs. Over on the Blue Sky Factory blog new daddy (congratulations!) DJ writes a post about why he thinks opt-out in any context is a poor marketing decision. One of his commenters follows up with a long comment about how recipients shouldn’t get angry when...
April 9, 2010
Spam is in the eye of the beholder
09April
But only the opinion of the recipient counts. So says a blog post on All Spammed Up. I’m sorry, but you don’t get to decide that. And by “you” I mean businesses. Businesses and their marketing departments who look at email as a fast, convenient way to reach a lot of people with their very important messages. Now for the purposes of this discussion I’ll make some definitions clear. I’m not talking...
April 8, 2010
We only mail people who sign up!
08April
I get a lot of calls from clients who can’t understand why they have spamtraps on their lists. Most of them tell me that they never purchase or rent lists, and they only mail to people who sign up on their website. I believe them, but not all of the data that people input into webforms is correct. While I don’t have any actual numbers for how many people lie in forms, there was a...
April 6, 2010
The psychic and the not-really-opt-in
06April
I’ve been getting a continual stream of spam from a psychic. I blogged about it a few months ago, and even had a call with the psychic’s ESP. None of that seemed to matter. Every few days I’d get another ad for psychic candles, or recording services or whatever. It wasn’t mail I could easily filter, and every time I’d get it I’d growl and dump it in my junk...
March 31, 2010
Blocklists, delisting and extortion
31March
As I’m sure many of you have heard by now there is a new blocklist called ‘nszones.’ This blocklist is apparently stealing data from a number of other publicly accessible blocklists, combining the data and then charging folks for delisting. This is a scam attempting to extort money from people. The blocklist has no way to actually remove IPs from the parent zones and I’m...
RSS - Posts