TagTWSD

November 12, 2009

TWSD: Privacy protection for commercial domains

By laura

2 Min read

2 comments

12November

One of my major pet peeves is supposedly legitimate companies hiding behind privacy protection in their whois records. There is absolutely no reason for a legitimate company to do this. There are lots of reasons a non-legitimate company might want to hide behind privacy services, but I have never heard a good reason for legitimate companies to hide. Look, a company sending any commercial email is...

October 20, 2009

Who are you and why are you mailing me?

By laura

4 Min read

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20October

I’ve mentioned here before that I use tagged addresses whenever I sign up for. This does help me mentally sort out what’s real spam and what’s just mail I’ve forgotten I’ve signed up for. Yesterday, I received and email from e-fense.com thanking me for my interest in their new product. The mail came to a tagged address, but not a tag that I would have given to e...

October 16, 2009

TWSD: My lunch is not spam

By laura

7 Min read

6 comments

16October

My ISP information page occasionally gets trackback pings from various blog posts. This week one of the trackbacks was from a blog post titled “One man’s Spam is another man’s lunch.” The theme of the blog post was that email marketers are poor, put upon business people that have to contend with all sorts of horrible responses from recipients, spam filtering companies and...

August 21, 2009

You might be a spammer if…

By laura

1 Min read

20 comments

21August

… the best thing you have to say about your email practices is “They’re CAN SPAM compliant.”
… text to .gif is a vital part of your email generation process
… you have to mail from multiple ESPs in order to get good delivery
Please contribute your own in the comments.
I’d also like to thank Al for guest posting 2 days this week. Thanks, Al!

May 19, 2009

TWSD: Dumb and dumber

By laura

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19May

I recently received a spam offering to get one of my personal websites listed in foreign search engines.  Harvesting addresses off websites is dumb. Even dumber is sending a followup a week later with a notice at the top. Did you receive the e-mail which I sent to you recently (copied here-below)? Please confirm since I have had problems lately with emails intercepted by spam-filters set too high...

May 5, 2009

TWSD: Run, hide and obfuscate

By laura

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05May

Spammers and spamming companies have elevated obfuscating their corporate identities to an artform. Some of the more dedicated, but just this side of legal, spammers set up 3 or 4 different front companies: one to sell advertising, one or more to actually send mail, one to get connectivity and one as a backup for when the first three fail. Because they use rotating domain names and IP addresses...

April 22, 2009

TWSD: Lying and Hiding

By laura

4 Min read

2 comments

22April

Another installment in my ongoing series: That’s What Spammers Do. In today’s installment we take a look at a company deceiving recipients and hiding their real identity. One of my disposable addresses has been getting heavily spammed from mylife.com. The subject lines are not just deceptive, they are provably lies. The mail is coming from random domains like urlprotect.com or...

April 21, 2009

Buying lists and other stupid marketing tricks

By laura

3 Min read

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21April

Back in November, I commented on Zoominfo and that they were selling senders very bad lists. At that time, Zoominfo did not have my current information. They have since rectified that problem and are now selling my information to people. This morning, I received an email that said: I wanted to follow up on a previous email I sent out a couple days ago.  At Company, we offer an affordable...

March 17, 2009

How to devalue your mailing lists

By steve

5 Min read

2 comments

17March

This morning I got spam about college basketball – Subject: Inside: your ESPN Tourney Guide. That’s anything but unusual, but this spam got through my spam filters and into my inbox. That’s a rare enough event that I’m already annoyed before I click on the mail in order to mark it as spam. Wait a second, the spam claims to be from Adobe. And it’s sent to a tagged...

February 5, 2009

Who is Julia and why won't she leave me alone?

By laura

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05February

There seems to be some new spam software in use. Julia <random last name> keeps telling me about her new webcam, how much she wants to date me and wants to know when I want to visit. These spams started February 1. I’ve had 179 caught by my MUA filters, and 152 caught by spamassassin (SA score >7 are filtered to a special account). This is exactly the type of pattern that causes...