Tagsubscription

September 19, 2016

Ongoing subscription form abuse

By laura

4 Min read

3 comments

19September

Last week Spamhaus posted information on the ongoing subscription attacks. They provided a more information about them that was not make public previously, including some information about the volume of mail some targets received. Today SendGrid also blogged about this, going into a little more detail about why senders should care about this. They also provided a number of suggestions for how to...

September 16, 2016

Spamhaus and subscription bombing

By laura

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16September

Spamhaus released a blog post today discussing the recent subscription bombing: Subscription bombing COI captcha and the next generation of mail bombs. As I mentioned in my initial posts, this abusive behavior goes beyond spamming. This is using email to harass individuals. Spamhaus even mentions a potential service that can be used to do these kinds of mailbombing. Things folks need to know is...

September 8, 2016

Incentivizing incites fraud

By laura

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08September

There are few address acquisition processes that make me cringe as badly as incentivized point of sale collection. Companies have tried many different ways to incentivize address collection at the point of sale. Some offer the benefit to the shopper, like offering discounts if they supply an email address. Some offer the benefits to the employee. Some offer punishments to the employee if they...

August 23, 2016

Open subscription forms going away?

By laura

3 Min read

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23August

A few weeks ago, I got a call from a potential client. He was all angry and yelling because his ESP had kicked him off for spamming. “Only one person complained!! Do you know him? His name is Name. And I have signup data for him! He opted in! How can they kick me off for one complaint where I have opt-in data? Now they’re talking Spamhaus listings, Spamhaus can’t list me! I have...

August 18, 2016

Ongoing subscription attack

By laura

2 Min read

6 comments

18August

Brian Krebs posted a couple days ago about his experience with the subscription bomb over the weekend. He talks about just how bad it was over the weekend. At approximately 9:00 a.m. ET on Saturday, KrebsOnSecurity’s inbox began filling up with new newsletter subscriptions. The emails came in at a rate of about one new message every 2-3 seconds. By the time I’d finished deleting and unsubscribing...

August 3, 2016

July 2016: The Month in Email

By laura

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03August

We got to slow down — and even take a brief vacation — in July, but we still managed to do a bit of blogging here and there, which I’ll recap below in case you missed anything. At the beginning of the month, I wrote about email address harvesting from LinkedIn. As you might imagine, I’m not a fan. A permissioned relationship on social media does not equate to permission to email...

July 17, 2013

Growing your list carefully

By laura

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17July

Karl Murray wrote a great set of recommendations for growing an email marketing list. I really can’t think of anything I would have said differently. Touching customers and getting contact information from them is great, but there are situations where this gets bad addresses. Too many bad addresses can impact delivery. So how do you grow your list without falling into a delivery trap? The...

October 30, 2012

Harvesting and forging email addresses

By laura

3 Min read

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30October

For the contact address on our website, Steve has set up a rotating set of addresses. This is to minimize the amount of spam we have to deal with coming from address harvesters. This has worked quite well. In fact it works so well I didn’t expect that publishing an email address for taking reader questions would generate a lot of spam. Boy, was I wrong. That address has been on the website...

July 23, 2012

Leaving money on the table

By laura

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23July

On August 1 two domains in the Netherlands are going away: wanadoo.nl and orange.nl. Current users of these domains are being transitioned to new addresses at online.nl. Mailchimp has more information and links. This is a good time for all of us to consider how easy it is for a subscriber to change their address of record. Some senders just have the subscriber unsubscribe from one address and...

March 1, 2012

Gathering data at subscription time

By laura

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01March

I recently received a survey from my Congressional Representative. She wanted to know what I wanted her to focus on in the coming year. I decided to go ahead and answer the survey, as I have some rather strong opinions on some of the stuff happening in Congress these days. The email itself was pretty unremarkable, although quite well done. I was as much interested in answering the survey because...