This month in email: October 2013

What did we talk about in October? Let’s take a look back over this month.

The email industry

A number of things happened this month in the industry. The J.D. Falk award was given to Gary Warner for his work in education. We also discussed problems at SORBS and changes at Spamcop. It was also Yahoo!’s 16th birthday this month.

Delivery and spam

Inspired by conversations with colleagues, I wrote a post about how delivery people are there to help senders.  Then I talked about good and bad mail, using mail we’ve received as examples. EmailInform sent me spam, addressed to someone who wasn’t me. A a random RV dealer sent me mail that violated CAN SPAM and mentioned a law that never actually made it to a law. Then the DMA had a bit of a mailing oops, which they quickly apologized for. There were also some examples of not-quite spam, but email that was sent badly or to the wrong person and one example of a well done cold email.

Security Issues

We do regularly talk about security issues and October was no different. The big news was that Adobe had a major security breach losing not only customer data but also source code. Adobe source code isn’t the only thing that leaked, our abacus support address found its way onto phishing lists. Experian was caught selling PII to identity thieves.  LinkedIn released a new application that’s mostly indistinguishable from malware.

Legal Posts

In the legal realm, we posted about ICANN going after Dynamic Dolphin for violating their registrar agreement. In response to some discussions, we also talked about the legal discovery process and email.

Related Posts

What not to do when buying lists

Saturday morning I check my mail and notice multiple emails from the DMA. Yes, I got three copies of an email from the US Direct Marketing Association with the subject line Kick It Up A Notch With The DMA Career Center. It seems the DMA are buying addresses from various companies. Because I use tagged email addresses, this means their naive de-duping doesn’t realize that laura-x and laura-y are the same email address. Of course, they’ve also managed to send to an untagged email address, too. I have no idea where they got that particular address; I’m sure I’ve never handed that address over to the DMA for any reason.
Saturday afternoon, I check one of the professional filtering / anti-spam mailing list.  Some subscribers are asking for copies of spam from 97.107.23.191 to .194. They’d seen a lot of mail to non-existent email addresses from that range and were looking to see what was going on and who was sending such bad mail. Multiple people on the list popped up with examples of the DMA mail.
Sunday morning, I checked the discussions wherein I discovered the DMA was added to the SBL (SBL 202218, SBL 202217, SBL 202216). It seems not only did they hit over a hundred Spamhaus spamtraps, they spammed Steve Linford himself.

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No, I'm really not Christine

Got this to one of my accounts recently.

Congratulations and welcome to emailinform.

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The DMA responds

Stephanie Miller has posted over on the DMA blog explaining just what went down with the mailing that got the DMA SBLed over the weekend.
Ken Magill has a pair of articles about the email from the DMA. Oops: DMA spams Spamhaus and others and What we can learn from the DMA.

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