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Venkat posts today about the ruling in the Asis v. Azoogle case. I have not yet had a chance to read the whole ruling, but in talking with Mickey over at SpamSuite it seems to expand the Gordon ruling a bit.
Mickey posts on Intellectual Intercourse about spam received from a recruiting agency trying to get him to hire one of their clients. This spam was amusing in that it contained reference to a bill that Mickey helped defeat years ago.
Box of Meat blog links to a CSO online article graphically demonstrating a botnet. The representation is really helps to understand the scope of the problem.
On Bronto Blog DJ posts about resurrecting old addresses. He has it right when he says: “If you continue to send email to customers that is random and unexpected, there will be consequences.”
Matt at ReturnPath has a couple posts about who should get delivery services and how ReturnPath chooses customers. This is something I end up dealing with occasionally. There are not specific types of companies I refuse to do consulting for. I will generally provide consulting on best practices to any business segment. My one restriction is that I will not provide ISP relations (ie, contacting the ISPs) for companies that do not send opt-in email. This has caused consternation with some potential customers.
Mark Brownlow at No Man is an iland suggests renaming “open rate” as “render rate” in an effort to make it much clearer what “open rates” really measure. Expect to see render rates referred to here on this blog in the future.
Josh talks about suppression list abuse on Deliverability.com. For those of us who use unique addresses for every signup, it quickly becomes clear that there are leaks in the suppression process. I have also seen problems with leaks from subscriptions, so do not think the problem is just in suppressions.

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Yahoo and Spamhaus

Yahoo has updated and modified their postmaster pages. They have also put a lot of work into clarifying their response codes. The changes should help senders identify and troubleshoot problems without relying on individual help from Yahoo.
There is one major change that deserves its own discussion. Yahoo is now using the SBL, XBL and PBL to block connections from listed IP addresses. These are public blocklists run by Spamhaus. Each of them targets a different type of spam source.
The SBL is the blocklist that addresses fixed spam sources. To get listed on the SBL, a sender is sending email to people who have never requested it. Typically, this involves email sent to an address that has not opted in to the email. These addresses, known as spamtraps, are used as sentinel addresses. Any mail sent to them is, by definition, not opt-in. These addresses are never signed up to any email address lists by the person who owns the email address. Spamtraps can get onto a mailing list in a number of different ways, but none of them involve the owner of the address giving the sender permission to email them.
Additionally, the SBL will list spam gangs and spam supporters. Spam supporters include networks that provide services to spammers and do not take prompt action to remove the spammers from their services.
The XBL is a list of IP addresses which appear to be infected with trojans or spamware or can be used by hackers to send spam (open proxies or open relays). This list includes both the CBL and the NJABL open proxy list. The CBL list machines which appear to be infected with spamware or trojans. The CBL works passively, looking only at those machines which actively make connections to CBL detectors. NJABL lists machines that are open proxies and open relays.
The Policy Block List (PBL) is Spamhaus’ newest list. Spamhaus describes this list as

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EEC shows how not to send email

The Email Experience Council is the email marketing arm of the Direct Marketing Association. They recently sent out a mailing that demonstrated what not to do when sending email, including:

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