Legitimate mailers need to distinguish themselves from spammers. One important piece of that is knowing what spammers do. SendGrid has put together some information on common scams and techniques spammers use to get email delivered. Some of these terms, like doxxing and swatting, are not specifically email related. However, they are used against people who are fighting abuse on the Internet...
I sent in a complaint to an ESP earlier today. This was mail from a major UK retailer to an address that is not used to sign up for mail. It’s part of an ongoing stream of spam related to UK services and products. I believe most of this is because one of the data selling companies has that address associated with someone who is not me. I did explain I believed this was a purchased address...
In the delivery space, stuff comes in cycles. We’re currently in a cycle where people are unhappy with spam filters. There are two reasons they’re unhappy: false positives and false negatives. False positives are emails that the user doesn’t think is spam but goes into the bulk folder anyway. Fales negatives are emails that the user does thing is spam but is delivered to the...
I’ve been slammed the last few days and blogging is that thing that is falling by the wayside most. I don’t expect this to change much in the very short term. But, I do have over 1200 blog posts, some of which are still relevant. So I’ll be pulling some older posts out and sharing them here while I’m slammed and don’t have a lot of time left over to generate new...
One of the hardest deliverability situations to address is when all mail from a certain sender is going to the bulk folder. I’ve had numerous clients come to me to address this situation over the years. Ideally, clients come to me before all their mail is going to bulk. Then we can make some tweaks and changes to their mail program, repair the reputation and then recover other addresses. We...
Many of the operational goals of a commercial spammer aren’t related to email delivery at all, rather they revolve around optimizing ROI and minimizing costs. That’s even more true when the spammer isn’t trying to sell their own product, rather they’re making money by sending spam for other companies. Most legitimate network providers pay at least lip service to not...
Judging by the amount of B2B spams I’ve gotten this past week, a number of businesses got bright, shiny new email programs for Christmas. “Like to set up a call with you…” “Just need 10 minutes of your time to explore…” “Love to jump on a call and tell you about our product…” That’s just the mail that comes into my personal address...
This showed up in my mailbox earlier today: The tweet in question From Crunchbase: “Pluck is an email prospecting tool that gives you the email addresses of the people tweeting about subjects related to your business.” Prospecting: another name for spamming. Look, I know that you want to sell you’re newest, greatest product to the world. But just because I tweet something with a...
There was quite a bit of content I cut out on my rant about parasites in the email ecosystem earlier this week. I had whole section on people who ask to connect on LinkedIn and then immediately send a pitch or scrape your address and add it to their marketing automation software and start spamming. Generally, the only reason I will drop someone off LinkedIn is because they do this. Today, one of...
As a small business owner I am a ripe target for many companies. They buy my address from some lead generation firm, or they scrape it off LinkedIn, and they send me a message that pretends to be personalized but isn’t really. “I looked at your website… we have a list of email addresses to sell you.” “We offer cold calling services… can I set up a call with you...
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