TWSD: Dumb and dumber

I recently received a spam offering to get one of my personal websites listed in foreign search engines.  Harvesting addresses off websites is dumb. Even dumber is sending a followup a week later with a notice at the top.

Did you receive the e-mail which I sent to you recently (copied here-below)? Please confirm since I have had problems lately with emails intercepted by spam-filters set too high.

No, really, my spam filter isn’t set too high. In fact, given this spam hit my inbox, I would say my spam filter is set too low.
Hey, spam filters are a problem for lots of people. But when you’re actually harvesting addresses from websites and spamming, you don’t get to complain that filters are accurate enough to catch your spam.
This is something I talk with clients about frequently. If their mail is getting caught in spam filters it’s bad, but it’s usually because something they are doing makes their mail appear to be spam to recipients. The solution is to send mail that does not look like spam, not to expect recipients to change their spam filtering schemes.
Coping with spam filters is challenging. Good senders do get caught by spam filters and have to compensate and make changes in their own processes. It’s not fair, it’s not ideal, it’s not what anyone wants. Unfortunately, that’s one of the costs of doing business using email and not one I see decreasing any time soon.

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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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How Spamfilters Work

AllSpammedUp has a post describing the primary techniques anti-spam filters use to identify mail as spam or not spam. While is this not sender or delivery focused knowledge, it is important for people sending mail to have a basic understanding of filtering mechanisms. Without that base knowledge, it’s difficult to troubleshoot problems and resolve issues.

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But that's what spammers do!

A few weeks ago I was asked my opinion about a delivery situation. It seems that a sender wanted to mail to a purchased email list. They asked what I thought about getting fresh IP addresses and domains to use to send mail to the purchased list. “We know we’re going to get complaints, probably hit spamtraps and generally have problems with the first few sends of the list. We want to do this without harming our reputation. We figure if we move over to different domains and different IP addresses than we can send this mail and not suffer a reputation hit.”
Uh. Yeah. That’s what spammers do. They split off their mail into discrete sets so that they can spam with impunity and still have one or two ranges that have a good reputation and decent delivery. Some spammers have taken the discrete companies to extremes, and have a series of companies. They purchase a new list and send it through their companies one by one. At each step, they aggressively purge off bounces and complainers. Gradually, they move the list through their steps, resulting in a list that generates few complaints that they can send through their high reputation companies with few delivery problems.
Sure, legitimate mailers can do the same type of thing. But how legitimate can a sender be if they are using spammer tactics? And these are not mailers unwittingly doing something that spammers also do, these are mailers who are using spammer tactics for exactly the same reason spammers do it. They are trying to send mail people do not want, but send it in a way that does not negatively affect their bottom line.
Spammers hide and try to avoid their bad reputation. Legitimate mailers do not.

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