Related Posts

Busy Busy.

Getting ready to head to MAAWG next week. We leave for the plane in a couple hours. I expect there will be some interesting information coming out of the talks and sessions and will be sharing some of the more interesting bits throughout the week.
Also, Steve has written a new tool to visualize blacklists. He’s put up a beta version. It still has a few bugs and missing features, but there are already some interesting patterns in XBL data with it.
The demo installation only displays XBL data (rather than letting you overlay multiple datasets) and is missing search and bookmarking, amongst other things. Enough disclaimers yet?

Read More

Tools for monitoring email

A number of groups provide tools for monitoring email performance.
Some of these tools are provided by ISPs, like Hotmail and AOL have postmaster webpages. Hotmail also provides things like SNDS so you can monitor what Hotmail is seeing about your network.
Al has a new blacklist stats center over at DNSBL.com. Of interest is the accuracy of some of the widely used lists like Spamhaus, Spamcop, and PSBL. Other lists like FiveTen were wildly inaccurate. In fact, Al has shown that blocking mail from any IP with a 7 in it is more accurate (more spam hits, less non-spam hits) than FiveTen.
ReturnPath provides free reputation lookup and monitoring based on the data they acquire.

Read More

Changes at AOL Postmaster desk

The recent layoffs at AOL did affect the AOL Postmaster desk, and information I have received is that there was significant loss. As a result of the staff decrease, some changes have been made to the whitelisting and FBL processes. In order for a FBL to be approved it must meet the new FBL guidelines. In a nutshell, anyone wanting to get a FBL from AOL must meet ONE of the following criteria.

Read More