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...
Earlier this year Ken Magill reported that a judge in the UK was allowing a libel case against Spamhaus to go forward. I thought for sure I’d blogged about the case at the time, but apparently I didn’t. The short version is that today Spamhaus announced the lawsuit was settled and the complainants paid for Spamhaus’ legal fees. As with most legal cases the details are complex...
Just yesterday a group of delivery folks were discussing email verification services over IRC. We were talking about the pros and cons, when we’d suggest using them, when we wouldn’t, which ones we’ve worked with and what our experiences have been. I’ve been contemplating writing up some of my thoughts about verification services but it’s a post I wanted to spend...
A code glitch in a new DBL sub-zone known as 'Abused-Legit' caused the new Abused-Legit zone to list ".net." for 60 minutes from 08:35 UTC. — Spamhaus (@spamhaus) December 17, 2014 Spamhaus are rolling out a new subzone of the DBL, for domains whose webservers have been compromised and used to host spam landing pages, often via mass compromises of their management control...
I’m seeing an increase in the number of articles stating wildly wrong things about spam traps. Some have started claiming that typo traps are new. Or that typo traps are newly used by Spamhaus. These claims make for great copy, I guess. Wild claims about how the evil anti-commerce self-appointed internet police are actively trying to trap marketers get clicks. These claims also...
Promoted from yesterday’s comments, Spamhaus comments on my discussion of filtering companies getting tired of ESPs. You hit the nail square on, Laura. As Laura knows but many here might not, I am with the Spamhaus project. At one time I was leading efforts to clean up ESP spam. I am not deeply involved with ESP listings any longer. I can however testify that ESPs ask Spamhaus volunteers...
ROKSO is the Register of Known Spamming Operations. It is a list of groups that have been disconnected from more than 3 different networks for spamming. ROKSO is a little bit different than most of the Spamhaus lists. The listings themselves talk more about the background of the listees and less about the specific emails that are the problem. Many ISPs and ESPs use ROKSO during customer vetting...
Spamhaus wrote about the return of open relays yesterday. What they’re seeing today matches what I see: there is fairly consistent abuse of open relays to send spam. As spam problems go it’s not as serious as compromised machines or abuse-tolerant ESPs / ISPs/ freemail providers – either in terms of volume or user inbox experience – but it’s definitely part of the...
Delivra has a new whitepaper written by Ken Magill talking about the value (or lack thereof) of relationships with ISPs. In Ken’s understated way, he calls baloney on ESPs that claim they have great delivery because they have good relationships with ISPs. He’s right. I get a lot of calls from potential clients and some calls from current clients asking me if I can contact an ISP on...
A few months ago, Ken Magill asked marketers, including the folks at Only Influencers to provide him with questions to pass along to Spamhaus. Spamhaus answered the first set in March, but then were hit with the Stophaus attack and put answering further questions on hold. Last week, they provided a second set of answers and this week they provided a third. Nothing in there is surprising, but...
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