I have to admit, the closer we get to election day the more distracted I’m getting. This will be the 8th presidential election I’m eligible to vote in and one I’m following closely. We even watched the 2nd debate live on the trip over to the UK. As with the 2008 and 2012 election, email marketing is a huge portion of candidate strategy. Many companies have been tracking how the...
August was a busy month for both Word to the Wise and the larger world of email infrastructure. A significant subscription attack targeted .gov addresses, ESPs and over a hundred other industry targets. I wrote about it as it began, and Spamhaus chief executive Steve Linford weighed in in our comments thread. As it continued, we worked with M3AAWG and other industry leaders to share data and...
The recent subscription bombs have started me thinking about how online organizations handle abuse, or don’t as the case may be. Deciding what to address is all about severity. More severe incidents are handled first. Triage is critical, there’s never really enough time or resources to investigate abuse. What makes an event severe? The answer is more complicated that one might think...
Dear Laura, I’ve been having a discussion with a colleague who is particularly frustrated by unwanted email he gets from retailers. Specifically, these are retailers who he’s never given an email address, but whose sites he’s browsed recently. He understands how retargeting works with web ads, but questions if it’s really acceptable to retarget in the email channel or if that violates CAN-SPAM or...
Over the weekend I’ve been seeing a number of over the top, hyperbolic blog posts about the Trump Campaign’s agency getting suspended from their ESP for spamming. Adestra suspended the Donald Trump campaign for “for committing some of the most egregious spamming in the history of the Internet in an effort to save his broke campaign.” That quote about “most egregious...
It’s not often spammers send me their campaign statistics, but on Tuesday one did. The spam came “from” news@udemy.com, used udemy.com in the HELO and message-ids and, sure enough, was advertising udemy.com: Received: from udemy.com (unknown [198.20.115.217]) by ... From: Udemy <news@udemy.com> Subject: The Photoshop Secret - Master Adobe Photoshop like a Pro...
We’re officially halfway through 2016, and looking forward to a slightly less hectic month around here. I hope you’re enjoying your summer (or winter, for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere). Our first June blog post marked the fifteen year anniversary of the very first anti-spam conference, SpamCon. As I noted, many of the people at that conference are still working in the...
There seems to have been an uptick in the number of folks harvesting addresses from their LinkedIn contacts and adding them to mailing lists. I’ve been seeing this in my own mailbox. I’m getting added to different lists and because I used a tagged address I know these folks are harvesting from LinkedIn. This behavior is really rude. Just because someone accepted your contact request...
It’s a wild election season here in the US. In the past few presidential elections, email has played a bigger and bigger role in messaging and fundraising. President Obama’s campaign used email effectively, but sent huge volumes. In fact, the volume was so heavy, it led to a joke on the Daily Show. (Video: email question at the 5:56 mark) Jon Stewart: “We have been talking here for...
Sanford Wallace has been sentenced to 2 years in jail by the US District court in San Jose for contempt of court and electronic mail fraud. Sanford has been around for more than 2 decades. He is one of the spammers that drove me to learn how to read headers and report spam back in the late nineties. Sanford has been in and out of courts and the news almost as long as he’s been spamming...
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