Recent Posts

8 things that make your mail look like spam

In the comments of last week’s Wednesday question John B. asked

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New player in the DMARC space

Over on the DMARC-Discuss list, Comcast announced they had turned on DMARC validation and companies that publish DMARC records should start receiving reports from Comcast.

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A Spam Blast from the Past

A couple of days ago an ex-employee of Opt-In Inc., was kind enough to do a Reddit AMA answering questions about their experience working with Steve Hardigree in the “legitimate” email marketing industry, back in the early 2000s.
The whole thing is worth a read, but I thought I’d share some of his more interesting answers here.
Everyone knows everyone

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Address leak leads to phishing

A number of people in the industry are reporting getting phishing emails to addresses they used at DocuSign.
There were initial reports of a DocuSign data breach back in December. Now it appears DocuSign is being used as a phishing target.

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How difficult is it to get on whitelists?

Today’s question comes from Leslie J.

Just how difficult is it for a small business that runs a highly compliant mailing system to find
their way onto whitelists at the big freemail/spam filter providers?
It seems utterly impossible meaning man hours are completely wasted messing around with subjects and content when if the same business sends the very same message through any number of well know ESPs, the message will hit the inbox like the Mafia are in charge of the shooting match.

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Email verification – what are we verifying

One of the ongoing discussions in the email space is the one about address verification. Multiple companies have sprung up to do “real time” email address verification. They ensure that addresses collected at the point of sale are valid.
But what does valid mean? In most of these contexts, valid means that the addresses don’t bounce and aren’t spam traps. And that is one part of validating email addresses.
That isn’t the only part, though. In my opinion, an even more important thing to validate is that the email address belongs to the person giving it to you. The Consumerist has had an ongoing series of articles discussing people getting mis-directed email from various companies.
Today the culprit is AT&T, who are sending a lot of personal information to an email address of someone totally unconnected to that account. There are a lot of big problems with this, and it’s not just in the realm of email delivery.
The biggest problem, as I see it, is that AT&T is exposing personally identifiable information (PII) to third parties. What’s even worse, though, is that AT&T has no process in place for the recipient to correct the issue. Even when notified of the problem, support can’t do anything to fix the problem.

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Another one bites the dust

NASK (the Polish domain registry) has taken over a number of domain names used in spreading viruses and infections.

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Does CAN SPAM require multiple opt-outs on emails?

Today’s Wednesday question comes from M. B.

My company sometimes sends mail to our list on behalf of 3rd parties. A recent 3rd party told us that CAN SPAM requires the email contain their opt-out link as well as ours. Is this correct?”

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Looking for questions

After a brief hiatus, I’d like to bring back the Wednesday question series. I have a few questions from before the hiatus that I’ll be answering over the next few weeks. But I’d like a few more to answer.
So bring on your questions. Send them to me at Jan15@contact.wordtothewise.com, tweet them to me @wise_laura or drop them here in the comments.
 

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