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.

Changes at Spamcop
Tor cleans up their lists

Related Posts

Spamhaus answers marketer questions

A few months ago, Ken Magill asked marketers, including the folks at Only Influencers to provide him with questions to pass along to Spamhaus. Spamhaus answered the first set in March, but then were hit with the Stophaus attack and put answering further questions on hold. Last week, they provided a second set of answers and this week they provided a third.
Nothing in there is surprising, but it’s worth folks heading over and reading.
There are a couple useful things that I think are worth highlighting.
When discussing spamtraps and how Spamhaus handles the traps.

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Is it real or is it spam?

The wanted but unexpected email is one of the major challenges facing ISPs and filter developers. If there was never any need or desire for people to receive email from someone they don’t know, then mail clients could be locked down to only accept mail from addresses on a whitelist. It wouldn’t completely solve the spam problem, for a number of reasons, but it would lessen the problem, particularly for average email users.
But, we don’t live in a world where we know beforehand who will be sending us mail, so we can’t just whitelist correspondents and reject everything else. I think this is a good thing. Email can be used to meet new people, develop new relationships and introduce new opportunities.
While the “cold call” email isn’t much talked about I think it’s worth some discussion. What makes a good cold email? What makes a bad one?  We can use two recent emails I received as examples.
Example 1:

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Posts and articles about the DMA spamming

The DMA kicks spam up a notch
The DMA: Spamming Job Services to a Purchased List
The DMA Spams A Bunch of Anti-spammers
The DMA sends e-mail that’s memorable, but not in a good way

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