“If you do stupid things, you’re going to get blocked,” says Jigsaw CEO Jim Fowler in an interview with Ken Magill earlier this week. Jigsaw is a company that rewards members to input their valuable business contacts. Once the addresses are input into Jigsaw, they are sold to anyone who wants them. Jigsaw gets the money, the people providing information get… something, the...
People are still talking about the White House spamming. At Al Iverson’s Spam Resource there are two posts, one from Jaren Angerbauer titled Guest Post: Email and the White House and another from Al himself titled White House Spam, Signup Forgery, and GovDelivery. Both are insightful discussions of the spam that the White House has been sending. Over at ReturnPath, Stephanie Miller talks...
Email is a great way to connect to and engage with people. It is also a medium where the sender doesn’t get to control the message as well as they might in other media. This means that sometimes email campaigns go wrong in a way that drives a national news story about how you are a spammer. In the stress and flurry of dealing with public accusations of spamming many companies overlook the...
Steve and I were talking this evening and I mentioned to him that I got “a lot of spam that wasn’t really spam. Know what I mean?”
He did. But if I tell that to you, what does it mean to you?
More on this in a couple days, but I’m onsite at a client’s for the next few days so it may take me a plane ride home to put all the thoughts down.
Trend Micro warns us today about how spam and phishing can hit you even in the closed ecosystem of a social networking system such as Facebook. Malware abounds. And in the social network arena, just like anywhere else, “using your account to send spam” is a common thing for the bad guys to want to do. In Rik Ferguson’s investigation (which I read about on CNet News), he came...
There has been some press about political spam recently. People are receiving email from the White House that they have not opted into. At a recent press conference a reporter challenged the press secretary to defend the practice. Chris Wheeler over at Bronto blog points out that CAN SPAM doesn’t apply as this is political mail, and CAN SPAM only covers commercial email. He also notes that...
One of the challenges anyone doing business on the internet faces is how to provide contact information so that potential customers can reach you in a form that spammers can’t easily abuse. Contact forms are the classic method, but they can (and are) abused by spammers. We decided to try something different. About 2 months ago, we started using rotating contact addresses. Every day a new...
Earlier this month a judge ruled that two insurance policies held by Scott Richter’s Media Breakaway were not liable to pay $6M in damages awarded in a previous case. Myspace initially sued Media Breakaway in 2007 for allegedly using phished Myspace accounts to send emails advertising Media Breakaway websites. In summer 2008 and arbiter ruled in favor of Myspace and against Media Breakaway...
Twitter and some of the other delivery blogs are all abuzz today talking about the consumer survey released by MAAWG (pdf link, large file) looking at end user knowledge and awareness of email security practices. The survey has a lot of good data and I strongly encourage people to look at the full report. There are a couple of results that are generating most of the buzz, including the fact that...
Over at Spamtacular Mickey talks about the email marketers’ syllogism. Anyone who doesn’t want our mail will opt-out. Most people don’t opt-out. Therefore, most people want our mail. This clearly fallacious reasoning is something I deal with frequently with my clients, particularly those who come to me for reputation repair. They can’t understand why people are calling them spammers...
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