Link roundup June 18, 2010

Hotmail has released a new version of their software with some changes. Return Path discusses the changes in depth, but there are a couple that senders may find helpful.

  1. If a user deletes a mail without reading it multiple times, Hotmail asks the user if they want to unsubscribe from the mail.
  2. Users can use a the new “sweep” feature to delete or file multiple emails easily

Finally, Hotmail confirms that mail can be moved from bulk folder to inbox before the user reads it if the reputation of the sender changes.
Facebook is signing mail with DKIM, but using a very weak key that could be cracked easily. Anyone signing with DKIM should use RSA-1024 keys, nothing less.
Tagged.com is facing legal action brought by the NY AG’s office for not turning a blind eye to child porn.
Facebook’s COO announces the death of email. News at 11. I’ve been hearing announcements about the death of email since I got my first real .edu account back in ’93 or so and I will believe it when I see it. Given how much email Facebook actually sends, I can’t imagine what they’re thinking here. Facebook is the new Myspace, which is the new Geocities. Social networking may be useful for some things, but somehow I can’t imagine trying to get a customer delisted from Spamhaus by posting on a Facebook wall. Or handling receipts from online purchases or any of the other things that people use email for that don’t involve socializing with friends.

Spam lawsuits: new and old
You might be a spammer if….

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Links for 7/8/9

With all the traveling I did last month, I’m still not back to full blogging speed. I have been slowly reading through the backlog of unread posts from my RSS feeds and there was lots of good stuff published.
Three myths about DKIM by John Levine. A very good explanation taking down some of the myths of DKIM. Also on the DKIM front, RFC 5585 DKIM Service Overview was published last month. According to Cisco, DKIM adoption is climbing. More information about DKIM is available at dkim.org and our own dkimcore.org.
The always awesome guys at Mailchimp have embraced twitter as part of their platform. Not only have they  set up their own service for link shortening so that links can be tweeted, but have also incorporated twitter stats into their mail dashboard.
Al has an insightful post on delivery, spam filtering vendors and the differences (or lack thereof) between B2C and B2B marketing. As I tell my customers, there is no switch inside the filtering scheme for “I know this person, they’re OK, let the mail in.”
Terry Zink has started a series about blacklists triggered by the recent SORBS announcement.  His first post, My take on blacklists, part 2, discusses how some people go about building a blocklist from scratch.
Happy 7-8-9 everyone.

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More on opt-out for B2B marketing

There is still a bit of discussion going on around the HBR article on how B2B mail should be opt-out not opt in on various delivery blogs. Over on the Blue Sky Factory blog new daddy (congratulations!) DJ writes a post about why he thinks opt-out in any context is a poor marketing decision.
One of his commenters follows up with a long comment about how recipients shouldn’t get angry when they get unsolicited email from a company they have interacted with.

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Reddit and email

Ben over at Mailchimp writes about Reddit discovering a lot of their mail was being blocked because they were sending from the Amazon EC2 cloud.

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