Spamhaus answers questions

Lost in all of the DOS attack news this week is that the first installment of Spamhaus answering questions from marketers in Ken Magill’s newsletter.
It’s well worth a read for anyone who is interested in hearing directly from Spamhaus.
One quote stood out for me, and it really sums up how I try to work with clients and their email programs.

Playing evasion games to avoid traps is nearly infinitely more difficult and troublesome than simply practicing good acquisition and hygiene.

This, to me, is the crux of what I do as a delivery expert. I tell clients how to get into the inbox by sending mail their recipients want. I’m not so dogmatic to think there is one way to do this. There are lots of ways to send good mail, have good hygiene and acquire good addresses. What works for one market may or may not work for another. The real trick is understanding the why of the rule, not just the rule.
IOW, delivery is all about the spirit rather than the rule of law.

CBL website and email back on line
Questioning standards

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Tom Sather (ReturnPath) and I will be speaking on Thursday at a webinar hosted by the Association of Business and Media Companies.
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Spamhaus under major dDOS

Late last night I, and a number of other folks, received mail from Spamhaus informing us of a major denial of service attack against their servers. The attack is so bad that the website and main mailserver is currently offline.
DNS services, including rsync and the mirrors, are up and running.
Spamhaus is working to bring the mailserver and website back up, and are hoping to have it up later today.
If there are any critical or particularly urgent SBL issues today, contact your ESP delivery team. The folks who were contacted do have an email address for urgent issues. This is not an address for routine queries, however, and most listees are going to have to wait until normal services are restored to have their listing addressed.
If there is something particularly urgent and your ESP or delivery team does not have a contact address, you can contact me an I can see what I can do.
UPDATE: Most of the IPs people have sent me are actually XBL/CBL listings. But right now the CBL webserver is responding slowly due to the DOS.
If you want to look up a listing without using the Spamhaus website you can use the “host” or “dig” command line tools. To do this reverse the digits in the IP address and append zen.spamhaus.org on the end.
So for the IP 10.11.12.13 you would query 13.12.11.10.zen.spamhaus.org

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Spamtraps are not the problem

Often clients come to me looking for help “removing spamtraps from their list.” They approach me because they’ve found my blog posts, or because they’ve been recommended by their ISP or ESP or because they found my name on Spamhaus’ website. Generally, their first question is: can you tell us the spamtrap addresses on our lists so we can remove them?
My answer is always the same. I cannot provide a list of spamtrap addresses or tell you what addresses to remove. Instead what I do is help clients work through their email address lists to identify addresses that do not and will not respond to offers. I also will help them identify how those bad addresses were added to the list in the first place.
Spamtraps on a list are not the problem, they’re simply a symptom of the underlying data hygiene problems. Spamtraps are a sign that somehow addresses are getting onto a list without the permission of the address owner. Removing the spamtrap addresses without addressing the underlying flaws in data handling may mean resolving immediate delivery issues, but won’t prevent future problems.
Improving data hygiene, particularly for senders who are having blocking problems due to spam traps, fixes a lot of the delivery issues. Sure, cleaning out the traps removes the immediate blocking issue, but it does nothing to address any other addresses on the list that were added without permission. In fact, many of my clients have discovered an overall improvement in delivery after addressing the underlying issues resulting in spamtraps on their lists.
Focusing on removing spamtraps, rather than looking at improving the overall integrity of data, misses the signal that spamtraps are sending.

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