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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dDOS spreads to the CBL

Spamhaus has mostly mitigated the dDOS against the Spamhaus website and mailserver, but now the CBL is under attack. They have been working to get that under protection as well, but it’s taking some time.
Right now there are no public channels for delisting from the CBL. The Spamhaus Blog will be updated as things change, and I’ll try and keep things updated here as well.
UPDATE: Cloudflare talks about the scope of the attack

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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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Spamhaus Speaks

There’s been a lot of discussion about Spamhaus, spam traps, and blocking. Today, Spamhaus rep Denny Watson posted on the Spamhaus blog about some of the recent large retailer listings. He provides us with some very useful information about how Spamhaus works, and gives 3 case studies of recent listings specifically for transactional messages to traps.
The whole thing is well worth a read, and I strongly encourage you to check out the whole thing.
There are a couple things mentioned in the blog that I think deserve some special attention, though.
Not all spam traps actually accept mail. In fact, in all of the 3 case studies, mail was rejected during the SMTP transaction. This did not stop the senders from continuing to attempt to mail to that address, though. I’ve heard over and over again from senders that the “problem” is that spamtrap addresses actually accept mail. If they would just bounce the messages then there would be no problem. This is clearly untrue when we actually look at the data. All of the companies mentioned are large brick and mortar retailers in the Fortune 200. These are not small or dumb outfits. Still, they have massive problems in their mail programs that mean they continue to send to addresses that bounce and have always bounced.
Listings require multiple hits and ongoing evidence of problems. None of the retailers mentioned in the case studies had a single trap hit. No, they had ongoing and repeated trap hits even after mail was rejected. Another thing senders tell me is that it’s unfair that they’re listed because of “one mistake” or “one trap hit.” The reality is a little different, though. These retailers are listed because they have horrible data hygiene and continually mail to addresses that simply don’t exist. If these retailers were to do one-and-out or even three-and-out then they wouldn’t be listed on the SBL. Denny even says that in the blog post.

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