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Words of wisdom from the hallway

Sitting around talking with folks in the hallway. One ISP rep mentions “we think we have found another front company of theirs…”
My only comment was “If a company needs to create a front company…” We all just looked at each other and didn’t need to come up with the “then…”
Really, if a sender thinks they must establish front companies to get connectivity or get customers or get delivery… then this is an admission of guilt.

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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
I can come up with any number of reasons why the email ended up in my inbox, rather than being caught by spam filters as the delivery expert originally claimed. But none of those reasons really matter. The expert in question is spreading delivery lore that is demonstrably false. Emails with that subject line will get through spam filters. I even added an extra 4 exclamation points in the subject line.
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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Fake privacy policies

I sign up at a lot of websites and liberally spray email addresses across the net. These signups are on behalf of one customer or another and each webform gets its own tagged and tracked email address. I always have a specific goal with each signup: getting a copy of a customer’s email, checking their signup process, auditing an affiliate on behalf of a customer or identifying where there might be a problem in a process. Because I have specific goals, I am pretty careful with these signups and usually uncheck every “share my email address” box I can find on the forms.
In every case the privacy policies of my clients and the things they tell me are explicit in that addresses will not be shared. It’s all opt-in, and email addresses are not shared without permission. Even in the cases where I am auditing affiliates, my clients assure me that if I follow this exact process my address will not be shared. Or so the affiliates have assured them.
Despite my care and the privacy policies on the websites, these addresses occasionally leak or are sold. This is actually very rare, and most of the websites I test never do anything with my address that I don’t expect. But in a couple cases these email addresses have ended up in the hands of some hard core spammers (hundreds of emails a day) and there was no useful tracking I could do. In other cases the volume has been lower, and I’ve watched the progression of my email addresses being bought and sold with morbid fascination.
Today an address I signed up at a website about a year ago got hit with multiple spams in a short time frame. All came from different IPs in the same /24. All had different domains with no websites. Whois showed all the domains were registered behind a privacy protection service. Interestingly, two of the domains used the same CAN SPAM address. The third had no CAN SPAM address at all. None of these addresses match the data I have on file related to the email signup.
It never ceases to amaze me how dishonest some address collection outfits. Their websites state clearly that addresses will not be bought an sold, and yet the addresses get lots of spam unrelated to the original signup. For those dishonest enough to do this they’ll never get caught unless recipients tags and tracks all their signups. Even worse, unless their partners test their signups or their mailing practices, the partners may end up unwittingly sending spam.

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