There are a lot of things all of us in the deliverability, abuse and blocklist space have heard, over and over and over again. They’re so common they’re running jokes in the industry. These phrases are used by spammers, but a lot of non-spammers seem to use them as well. The most famous is probably “I’m sure they’ll unblock me if I can just explain my business model...
Author Julie Czerneda posted about some of her writing techniques on Jim C. Hines’ blog today. Julie is one of my favorite authors. She’s a biologist so her science writing flows well for me. Too many folks try to write biology and get little nitpicky details wrong and it can disrupt the whole book for me. I spend way too much time thinking about the actual biology and lose track of...
I was cleaning out my inbox over the weekend and found a spam that actually made me laugh. Yes, it is spam advertising the “Official Greed[sic] Card Lottery.” It’s been 20 years since I’ve seen one of those! Live, work and study in the USA The American Dream Within Reach 50,000 people and their families will get a green card Simple registration within 5 minutes Yeah...
September’s big adventure was our trip to Stockholm, where I gave the keynote address at the APSIS Conference (Look for a wrapup post with beautiful photos of palaces soon!) and had lots of interesting conversations about all things email-related. Now that we’re back, we’re working with clients as they prepare for the holiday mailing season. We wrote a post on why it’s so important to make sure...
I’m back from a fun and successful trip to the APSIS Email Marketing Evolved conference. Of course, this means I’m digging out my mailboxes and going through mail I’ve ignored for the past week. It’s amazing how the spam builds up when I’m not tending to it every day. One of the new spam streams is coming into the role account we published with our recent job posting...
I’ve talked about spamtraps in the past but they keep coming up in so many different discussions I have with people about delivery that I feel the need to write another blog post about them. Spamtraps are … … addresses that did not or could not sign up to receive mail from a sender. … often mistakenly entered into signup forms (typos or people who don’t know their...
In the late 90s I was reasonably active in the anti-spam community and in trying to protect mailboxes. There were a couple catchphrases that developed as a bit of shorthand for discussions. One of them was “my server, my rules.” The underlying idea was that someone owned the different systems on the internet, and as owners of those systems they had the right to make usage rules for...
It’s been a busy blogging month and we’ve all written about challenges and best practices. I found myself advocating that any company that does email marketing really must have a well-defined delivery strategy. Email is such vital part of how most companies communicate with customers and potential customers, and the delivery landscape continues to increase in complexity (see my post...
This morning I woke up to news that Sanford Wallace pled guilty to spamming. Again. Sanford was one of the very early spammers (savetrees.com). He moved to email from junk faxing when Congress made junk faxing illegal in 2005. He sued AOL when AOL blocked his mail. He lost and the courts maintained that blocking spam was not a violation of the sender’s rights. Sanford then moved on to using...
Last month Brian Krebs reported that the Ashley Madison database was compromised. Ashley Madison is a dating site that targets married folks who are looking to have affairs. Needless to say, there is a lot of risk for users if their data is found on the released data. Today what is supposedly the Ashley Madison data was released. The release of this data can have some significant impacts on the...
RSS - Posts