Recent Posts

Microsoft delivery partnerships

Last week John Scarrow from Microsoft made a public statement on Deliverability.com about Microsoft’s approach to using available products in the email industry.

MAAWG SF

Blogging will probably be light next week. Steve and I are both headed to MAAWG SF. Steve will be presenting training on Monday and at one of the later sessions, too. I managed to get out of having to work this conference, so no presenting for me.
We’re both looking forward to seeing everyone. Drop by and say hi.

Google Buzz

Google Buzz has garnered a lot of attention this week, most of it looking at the privacy implications of requiring users to opt-out of sharing information with anyone who’s ever sent them email.
WARNING: Google Buzz Has a Huge Privacy Flaw
Fugitivus Blog (possibly NSFW due to language)
A dangerous buzz and opt-in isn’t just for email
How Google Buzz just blew your psuedonym
Lifehacker has a number of posts about Google Buzz and how to reset your settings.
I’ve already seen tweets and social media recommending using the networks generated by Google Buzz for marketing purposes.
I’m not very impressed with what I’ve heard about Google Buzz and the total lack of control it gives people over sharing information. I used to be very open with my information online, down to identifying the lab I worked in. I then said something on Usenet that upset someone. That person spent the next 4 months harassing me by phone at work and at home, and even went so far as to dig up my boss’ home number and harass her at home. I’ll be honest it was a scary experience. Even though I knew my stalker was 1500 miles away and extremely unlikely to actually show up on my doorstep, I was still worried for my safety.
That experience made me a lot more cautious about what I share online and how much information I give to people. Google Buzz seems to take a lot of the control of my information away from me. Which is why you won’t find me participating in the Google social network.
UPDATE: And here we go: Win a free laptop by following Hubspot on Google Buzz

Tagged.com's newest trick

I signed up a disposable address at tagged.com last summer, to see how their signup process went and how aggressive they were at marketing.
They mailed me maybe a dozen times over the course of a month and then the mail stopped.
Until today.
Today I got two messages from tagged.com, one from Sophia C (33) and one from Melinda E (27). The messages are identical except for the names and some of the advertising on the bottom.
I find it a bit coincidental that after all the recent news about Tagged that I start getting mail from them again. Mail that is not from anyone I know. Mail attempting to entice me into logging back into the tagged site.

Permission versus forgiveness

Stephanie at Return Path has a great blog post on permission and how permission is an ongoing process not a one time thing. There were a couple statements that really grabbed my attention.

Social network spam

I’ve been seeing more and more social network spam recently, mostly on twitter. In some ways it’s even more annoying than email spam. Here I am, happily having a conversation with a friend and then some spammer sticks their nose in and tweets “myproduct will solve your problem!”
It’s happened twice in the last week.
In most recent example, I was asking my twitter network for some advice on pasta making. I’ve made pasta a few times, but it’s never been exactly right. Not having an Italian grandmother to ask, I was looking for someone with experience in pasta making to answer a few questions. I was having an ongoing conversation with a friend who was helping me troubleshoot my problems. He gave me his recipe to try to see if that would work better. I thanked him profusely and replied that I would give it a try but probably not tomorrow because it was accounting day and those tend to run late. Someone replied to that tweet suggesting I try some random accounting software to make my accounting easier.
Just… No.
Interjecting product ads in a conversation may be the “acceptable” and “best practice” way to market through social networking. But, I can promise that you’re no better the guy who interrupts conversations at parties so he can hand out business cards for his affiliate program selling herbal male enhancement drugs.
Don’t be That Guy.
Update: Today’s twitter spam was from one of the email accreditation services attempting to sell me their email delivery services.

AOL transmitting 4xx error for user unknown

AOL is currently returning “451 4.3.0 <invaliduser@aol.com>: Temporary lookup failure” in some cases when they really mean “550 user unknown.” This message from AOL should be treated as 5xx failure and the message should not be retried (if at all possible) and the failure should be counted as a hard bounce for list management purposes.
This is something broken at AOL’s end, and the guys with the magic fingers that keep the system running are working to fix it. Right now there doesn’t seem to be an ETA on a fix, though.
Even if you are a sender who is able to stop the retries, you may see some congestion and delays when sending to AOL for the time being. Senders who don’t get the message, or who are unable to stop their MTAs from retrying 4xx mail will continue to attempt delivery of these messages until their servers time out. This may cause congestion for everyone and a noticeable slowdown on the AOL MTAs.
AOL blog post on the issue
HT: Annalivia

Tagged.com and the courts

I’ve seen multiple reports of Tagged.com and their interactions on various sides of the courtroom aisle.
On the good side, Tagged.com won a judgment against a spammer sending spam to Tagged.com users. (Tagged has a post on their blog about the win, but the direct link to that article doesn’t work).
On the minus side, yet another ruling against tagged.com. They’ve been accused of sending spam, including some mail that looks like a phish. They recently settled in a CA court, agreeing to dispose of certain addresses collected during a 3 month period in 2009.

TWSD: Using FOIA requests for email addresses

Mickey has a good summary of what’s going on in Maine where the courts forced the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to sell the email addresses of license purchasers to a commercial company.
There isn’t permission associated with this and the commercial company has no pretense that the recipients want to receive mail from them. This is a bad idea and a bad way to get email addresses and is no better than spammers scraping addresses from every website mentioning “fishing” or “hunting.”

Yahoo stops offering preferred delivery to Goodmail certified email

A week ago, Goodmail notified customers about upcoming changes to the Goodmail Certification program. They wanted customers to be aware that Yahoo was going to stop offering Goodmail certified email priority delivery and guaranteed inbox placement as of February first. I’ve talked with a number of people in the industry, including representatives of Goodmail and Yahoo about this change.
Yahoo was the first to respond to my request for a comment, and offered the following statements. The decision was made at some of the higher levels of management and my contact did not participate. I was told that Yahoo was looking to have more control over their incoming mail stream. They did not want to be contractually obligated to deliver email. The Yahoo rep also told me that Goodmail was in no way responsible for the Yahoo connectivity problems over the last couple weeks.
I also spoke with Goodmail. They also stated that Goodmail was in no way responsible for the Yahoo MTA problems. They are continuing to negotiate with Yahoo and are hoping to have full functionality to Goodmail certified email at Yahoo in the future. Also, Goodmail certified email may continue to see good delivery at Yahoo, but the certification symbol will not be displayed to Yahoo users.
I do believe Goodmail is continuing to negotiate with Yahoo, but I don’t expect to see any reversal of the decision any time soon. There are a number of underlying problems here, but reading between the lines it seems that Goodmail is certifying companies that send mail Yahoo users don’t want.
Last summer a number of people in the industry told me that Yahoo had a meeting with Goodmail and told Goodmail that the quality of the mail that they certified was not up to Yahoo’s standards. At that point, Goodmail dropped a number of clients and stopped taking on new clients. One colleague believed he had a slam-dunk application that would take days to approve. Instead he chased Goodmail sales reps for weeks looking for confirmation that his employer would be accepted. Eventually, he did receive a response: his employer was not accepted and there would be a full revamping of the qualifications for the certification program.
It seems, though, that any changes implemented by Goodmail over the summer did not improve the mail stream enough for Yahoo to continue outsourcing delivery decisions to Goodmail.
Quite frankly, I am unsurprised by this. My impression of Goodmail has always been they never really understood the role of a certifying agency. For any certifying agency to be successful, they must continually monitor certified customers and enforce standards. Goodmail’s initial certification process was fine, but they never seemed to follow through on the monitoring and enforcement. I remember sitting at lunch with one of their founders a few years ago and repeatedly asking the same questions: How are you going to police your customers? What are you going to do when bad mailers come to you? How are you going to enforce your standards? The answers I received were vague and left me with the opinion that they didn’t really understand what spammers would do, or pay, to get guaranteed inbox placement. I never felt they recognized the work involved in enforcing the high standards needed to keep their ISP partners happy with their service.
What distinguishes Goodmail from other certification services is that Goodmail doesn’t make recommendations to recipient ISPs. Instead, Goodmail partner ISPs are contractually required to accept Goodmail certified email and deliver that to the ISP. In this case, it appears the certified mail did not meet Yahoo’s standards, and Yahoo ended the contract. I don’t expect Yahoo to change their stance until Goodmail can convince Yahoo that Goodmail will treat Yahoo users email stream exactly the same as Yahoo does.