Organizing the mail flow

I get a lot of email. On a typical day I will get close to 2000 messages across my various work and personal accounts. About 60 – 70% of that mail is spam and caught by spamassassin or my mta filters and moved into mailboxes that I check once a day for false positives. About 15 – 10% of the remaining mail is from various discussion lists, and those are all sorted into their own mailboxes so I can keep conversations straight. The rest of the email is divided between mail directly to me and various commercial lists I have opted in to.
Up until recently, the commercial mail was all just dumped into my inbox. Nothing special happened to it it just sat there until I could read it. Recently, however, the volume of commercial mail has exploded, swamping my inbox. After losing track of some critical issues, I sat down and fixed my mail filters. Now, all my commercial and marketing mail (ie, mail I signed up for with tagged addresses) is now being filtered into its own mailbox.
There are two takeaways here.
One: the volume of commercial mail has increased significantly. Companies who were previously mailing me once a month are now mailing me twice a week. This contributed to the clutter and resulted in me pushing all commercial mail out of my inbox. I don’t think this increase is limited to just my mailbox, I believe many recipients are seeing an increase in commercial and marketing email, to the point where they’re finding it difficult to keep up with it all.
Two: Recipients have a threshold over which too much email makes their mailbox less usable. Once this threshold is reached they will take steps to change that. In my case, I can just filter all the commercial email as I use tagged addresses for all my signups. In other cases, they may start unsubscribing from all the mail cluttering their mailbox or blocking senders.
It is the tragedy of the commons demonstrated on a small scale.

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TWSD: breaking the law

I tell my clients that they should comply with CAN SPAM (physical postal address and unsubscribe option) even if the mail they are sending is technically exempt. The bar for legality is so low, there is no reason not to.
Sure, there is a lot of spam out there that does not comply with CAN SPAM. Everything you see from botnets and proxies is in violation, although many of those mails do actually meet the postal address and unsubscribe requirements.
One of my spams recently caught my eye today with their disclaimer on the bottom: “This email message is CAN SPAM ACT of 2003 Compliant.” The really funny bit is that it does not actually comply with the law. Even better, the address it was sent to is not published anywhere, so the company could also be nailed for a dictionary attack and face enhanced penalties.
It reminds me of the old spams that claimed they complied with S.1618.

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Delivery lore

Number of people believing outrageous statements on the Internet
(Image from Bad Astronomy)
Almost every delivery consultant, delivery expert or deliverability blog offers their secrets to understanding spam filters. As a reader, though, how do you know if the author knows what they’re talking about? For instance, on one of the major delivery blogs had an article today saying that emails with a specific subject line will not get past spam filters.
This type of statement is nothing new. The lore around spam filters and what they do and do not do permeates our industry. Most of the has achieved the status of urban legend, and yet is still repeated as gospel. Proof? I sent an email with the subject line quoted in the above blog post to my aol, yahoo, gmail and hotmail accounts. Within 3 minutes of sending the email it was in the inbox of all 4 accounts
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Not all delivery lore is true. In fact, most lore involving “always” “all” “never” or “none” is not going to be true. Just because you read it on the internet, and because it came from someone claiming to know what they’re talking about does not absolve individual senders from critically thinking about the information.

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I am sure, if asked, all the advertised companies would say they have no knowledge of spamming by their vendors. I’m sure they would say that their vendors tell them I opted in to the email and must have just forgotten. I am sure that this isn’t really spam.
Except it really is spam. Real companies with real brands do use the services of spammers. When caught they loudly protest their innocence and talk about rogue affiliates. In the best cases they will “fire” the affiliate and then look the other way when the affiliate signs back up.
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