Tagwisewednesday

Questions about Spamhaus

I have gotten a lot of questions about Spamhaus since I’ve been talking about them on the blog and on various mailing lists. Those questions can be condensed and summed up into a single thought. What engagement metrics should I monitor to avoid a Spamhaus listing? First off Spamhaus doesn’t care about about engagement. Spamhaus wants you to stop mailing people who never asked to...

Thoughts on bounce handling

This week’s Wednesday question comes from D. What are your thoughts on bounce handling There’s no specific standard for bounce handling as we often talk about it. While a lot of people will mention the RFCs, the RFCs only say what to do with a single email that gets a 4xy or a 5xy during the SMTP transaction. If the message gets a 5xy during the SMTP transaction, then the email MUST...

8 things that make your mail look like spam

In the comments of last week’s Wednesday question John B. asked Can you elaborate on specifics of “configure machines to not look like spam ware”? There are a lot of things that spamware does that is different from a lot of standard MTAs. Here are a list of things that may make your mail look like it is running spamware to a receiving server. Using weird values for HELO/EHLO, like a bare IP...

How difficult is it to get on whitelists?

Today’s question comes from Leslie J. Just how difficult is it for a small business that runs a highly compliant mailing system to find their way onto whitelists at the big freemail/spam filter providers? It seems utterly impossible meaning man hours are completely wasted messing around with subjects and content when if the same business sends the very same message through any number of...

Does CAN SPAM require multiple opt-outs on emails?

Today’s Wednesday question comes from M. B. My company sometimes sends mail to our list on behalf of 3rd parties. A recent 3rd party told us that CAN SPAM requires the email contain their opt-out link as well as ours. Is this correct?” The FTC’s most recent rulemaking says specifically that this sort of multiple opt-out is confusing for the consumer and the only company that...

Looking for questions

After a brief hiatus, I’d like to bring back the Wednesday question series. I have a few questions from before the hiatus that I’ll be answering over the next few weeks. But I’d like a few more to answer.
So bring on your questions. Send them to me at Jan15@contact.wordtothewise.com, tweet them to me @wise_laura or drop them here in the comments.
 

Poisoning Spamtraps

Today’s question comes from Dave in yesterday’s comment section. I wonder if spammers might submit harvested addresses to big-name companies known to not use confirmed opt-in just to poison what they believe might be spamtraps? It’s certainly possible that people submit addresses to forms and big-name companies. But I don’t really think that poisons the spamtrap. Depending...

Can I assume consumer and business filtering is the same?

Today’s question comes from Steve B. I wondered if you know much about hosted email providers such as google apps, Microsoft and yahoo. I have seen a rise in number of people using them to provide their corporate email service.   I am using the same logic that the rules governing delivery to gmail will effect those using google hosted email for example.  For Microsoft i have  been using...

Handling replies to bulk mail

This week’s Wednesday question comes from Ryan W. I’ve been noticing a few e-mail accounts who reply to our e-mail sends with spammy type replies such as, “hey this is intense…..(link)” what do you think should we be removing those e-mails from our mailing? There is no real clear answer to this question, but it’s certainly one that deserves some discussion...

What causes Spamhaus CSS listings

Today’s Wednesday Question comes from Zaib F. What causes the Spamhaus CSS listing in your experience other than Sender using multiple sets of IPs, to look as if they are a valid sender. Do you think a Spamtrap plays a role? I’ll preface this by saying I don’t know what the specific Spamhaus criteria are for listing on the CSS. I do know the overall goal of the CSS list is to...

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