News in the email space

Various things happening in the email space recently that are worth mentioning but don’t have enough to justify a whole blog post.
Verizon announced a new umbrella company for the AOL and Yahoo media properties, including things like Engadget, Huffington Post. Based on the various press articles I’ve seen this doesn’t appear to affect the email handling for either set of domains.

Making deliverability people swear since 2017. 

Spamhaus recently discovered an anonymous DNSBL that was taking their data and republishing it. They cut the company off and released a statement: Fraudulent DNSBL uncovered. Based on public discussions it appears the DNSBL was using other sources as well. Multiple people complained about a high false positive rate and lack of ability to delist. I don’t know how widely used it was, it’s a list I hadn’t heard of until a few weeks ago. If you’re looking for a filter / blocking list to use, you’re better off finding one that communicates with listees. That tends to mean it’s well run and responsible.
Experian has sold its cross channel marketing division, including Marketing Suite, CheetahMail, and Mail Publisher and some of its strategic marketing services to a venture capital firm. The chairman of the new company is former Exacttarget founder Peter McCormick. Worth watching the new company develop. I’m wondering how this might change Experian’s approach to permission based email. Right now, they have some rather sloppy data acquisition processes and don’t do a great job at sending to the right person. Just this month I got spam from their UK marketing arm targeting me as a university student looking for an apartment and needing to know my credit score. (Yes, I’ve shared the relevant information with the Experian folks. I expect they’ll investigate and tell me some UK college student wanted a free t-shirt and so handed over my email address. This doesn’t excuse Experian for the spam, they should have better data hygiene in place. And I know their in house experts and internal consultants have told them this, repeatedly.)
The FTC settled a claim with a group of Florida marketers for $500,000 related to CAN SPAM violations. These marketers hired affiliates to send mail on their behalf. Some of this mail falsified headers and lacked opt-out links. The final order is worth a read. (Stipulation final order pdf)
 
 

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Fake DNSBLs

Spamhaus recently announced a few years ago that they have discovered a company that is pirating various blocklists, relabeling them and selling access to them. Not only is the company distributing the zones, they’re also running a “pay to delist” scheme whereby senders are told if they pay money, they’ll be removed from the lists.
The fake company does remove the listing from the fake zones, but does nothing to remove the IP from the original sender. This company has been caught in the past and was blocked from downloading Spamhaus hosted zones in the past, but have apparently worked around the blocks and are continuing to pirate the zone data.
It’s not clear how many customers the blocklist has, although one ESP rep told me they were seeing bounces referencing nszones.com at some typo domains.
No legitimate DNSBL charges for delisting. While I, and other people, do consult for senders listed on the major blocklists, this is not a pay for removal. What I do is act as a mediator and translator, helping senders understand what they need to do to get delisted and communicating that back to the blocklist. I work with senders to identify good, clean addresses, bad address segments and then suggest appropriate ways to comply with the blocklist requirements.

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News and announcements: March 1, 2010

Some news stories and links today.
Spamhaus has announced their new domain block list (DBL). The DBL is a list of domains that have been found in spam.

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Asking for help with a blocklist

There are often questions arising about how to go about getting off a particular blocklist. A few years ago I led the MAAWG effort to document what to if if you were On a Blocklist (pdf link). That document was aimed primarily at MAAWG members and deliverability experts with working knowledge of blocklists. I think, even now, it’s a good background on how to deal with a listing and mail being blocked.
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There have been discussions on multiple mailing lists over the last week or so about how to deal with listings at different blocklists. Many folks on these lists have extensive experience, so these are good places to ask. With that being said, a lot of the requests lack sufficient details to help.
So, if you’re ever on a blocklist and want some help from a mailing list about the problem, here’s a short guide for how to ask for help.

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