Questions about Spamhaus

I have gotten a lot of questions about Spamhaus since I’ve been talking about them on the blog and on various mailing lists. Those questions can be condensed and summed up into a single thought.

What engagement metrics should I monitor to avoid a Spamhaus listing?

First off Spamhaus doesn’t care about about engagement.
Spamhaus wants you to stop mailing people who never asked to receive mail from you. That’s all.
Stop sending unsolicited bulk email. Period.
Engagement is mostly used by the large ISPs who are trying to work out which of you are sending mail people asked for and which of you are just harvesting addresses and spamming wildly. They’re using engagement as part of their metrics to separate out the good from the bad.
The only time engagement comes into play with Spamhaus is when you hire people like me to help you get out of the hole you’ve dug yourself. Those people like me? We tell you, “Well, Spamhaus wants you to go COI, but I think we can fix this problem without having to go so aggressive. I think if we fix your collection processes going forward and remove unengaged people, then you’ll only be mailing people who want to receive mail from you.” And then we go to bat for you with Spamhaus.
And I’ve made it work before so so they’ll give you a chance to have me help you stop being spammers. Not only do my methods work to stop future listings, some of my clients have reported a doubling of revenue from emails.
If marketers would stop sending mail to people who never asked to receive it, they would never have to deal with a Spamhaus block ever again. Spamhaus doesn’t go out of their way to look for senders, they just passively monitor addresses that have never asked for mail. Stop hitting those addresses and magically all your Spamhaus problems will go away.

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Thanks for your questions!

Thanks, everyone, who submitted questions to laura-questions@wordtothewise.com. We’ve gotten some great questions to answer here on the blog. I’m working through the emails and contacting folks if I have questions. I’ll be answering the first question on Wednesday.
I also did have someone harvest the address off the website and send me non-CAN SPAM compliant spam to it. I have to admit, I didn’t expect someone to harvest the address at all, but especially not within 12 hours of posting an address. Particularly someone who’s not harvested our contact address previously. I also am considering how much content I could get detailing taking the spammer to court in CA for violating CAN SPAM and the CA anti-spam statute.
 

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Bit.ly gets you Blocked

URL shorteners, like bit.ly, moby.to and tinyurl.com, do three things:

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Winning friends and removing blocks

I do a lot of negotiating with blocklists and ISPs on behalf of my clients and recently was dealing with two incidents. What made this so interesting to me was how differently the clients approached the negotiations.
In one case, a client had a spammer slip onto their system. As a result the client was added to the SBL. The client disconnected the customer, got their IP delisted from the SBL and all was good until the spammer managed to sweet talk the new abuse rep into turning his account back on. Predictably, he started spamming again and the SBL relisted the IP.
My client contacted me and asked me to intercede with Spamhaus. I received a detailed analysis of what happened, how it happened and how they were addressing the issue to prevent it happening in the future. I relayed the info to Spamhaus, the block was lifted and things are all back to normal.
Contrast that with another client dealing with widespread blocking due to a reputation problem. Their approach was to ask the blocking entity which clients they needed to disconnect in order to fix the problem. When the blocking entity responded, the customer disconnected the clients and considered the issue closed. They didn’t look at the underlying issues that caused the reputation problems, nor did they look at how they could prevent this in the future. They didn’t evaluate the customers they disconnected to identify where their processes failed.
The first client took responsibility for their problems, looked at the issues and resolved things without relying on Spamhaus to tell them how to fix things. Even though they had a problem, and is statistically going to have the occasional problem in the future, this interaction was very positive for them. Their reputation with the Spamhaus volunteers is improved because of their actions.
The second client didn’t do any of that. And the people they were dealing with at the blocking entity know it. Their reputation with the people behind the blocking entity was not improved by their actions.
These two clients are quite representative of what I’ve seen over the years. Some senders see blocking as a sign that somehow, somewhere there is a flaw in their process and a sign they need to figure out how to fix it. Others see blocking as an inconvenience. Their only involvement is finding out the minimum they need to do to get unblocked, doing it and then returning to business as usual. Unsurprisingly, the first type of client has a much better delivery rate than the second.

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