In almost every discussion of “how to stop spam” someone will come up with the idea that if a recipient only allowed known people to send them email then the spam problem would be solved. There are lots of problems with this type of solution, but one of the biggest is that it ignores that sometimes the unexpected email is wanted. Typically, these unexpected but wanted emails is from...
I tell my clients that they should comply with CAN SPAM (physical postal address and unsubscribe option) even if the mail they are sending is technically exempt. The bar for legality is so low, there is no reason not to. Sure, there is a lot of spam out there that does not comply with CAN SPAM. Everything you see from botnets and proxies is in violation, although many of those mails do actually...
I tend to avoid online sites that require you to register and provide information including email addresses. In my experiences companies cannot resist sending email and my email load is extremely heavy and I want less email, not more. Sometimes, though, what I need to do requires an online registration and giving an email address to a company I would really prefer not to have it. Recently, I had...
Last week a major player in the botnet arena was taken offline when they were shutdown by their upstream provider. With the demise of McColo, there has been a 30 – 50% drop in the amount of spam as measured by any number of different techniques. The CBL team has posted an article about their view of the McColo disconnection, which includes links to press articles about the shutdown...
In the past I’ve talked about vetting clients, and what best effort encompasses when ESPS try to keep bad actors out of their systems. But what does an ESP do to monitor clients ongoing? Al Iverson from ExactTarget says that they: Look at what clients are doing constantly. If too much of a client’s list is filtered out at import, If too much of their mail bounces, If they receive too...
As I mentioned in my post on spam from the Obama campaign, there have been reports of spam coming from the McCain campaign. However, the McCain campaign does not seem to be sending the volume of mail that the Obama campaign is, and so they are not as visible. A recent post over at Denialism Blog shows that the McCain campaign has some of the same problems as the Obama campaign. Chris talks about...
Late in the summer there were people talking about the spam coming from Senator Obama’s presidential campaign. At that time, most of the discussion was focused on the open subscription form on their website and that there were some individuals who had been fraudulently signed up and were now receiving email from the campaign. Last week, the Senator’s campaign again became a topic of discussion...
There have been a couple posts recently about a paper presented at the Fifth Conference on Email and Spam (CEAS). The paper showed how addresses beginning with different letters get different volumes of spam. But this post is not really about the paper, although it is an interesting academic review of spam, it is more about a memory that the discussions triggered. Long ago I was handling the...
A number of ESPs have been tracking problematic signups over the last few days. These signups appear to be coming from an abusive service called SpamZa. SpamZa allows anyone to sign up any address on their website, or they did before they were unceremoniously shut down by their webhost earlier this week, and then submits that address to hundreds of opt-in lists. This is a website designed to...
At Adventures in Email Marketing, there is a post up this morning about political spam. It seems Anna discovered that providing her email address on her voter registration card not only results in political groups sending her email to that address, but also that political email does not have to follow the rules of CAN SPAM. The article ends with a few questions and makes some suggestions. In...
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