Recent Posts

e360 v. Spamhaus

Mickey has been posting new documents in the e360 v. Spamhaus case. I’ve not had the time to read them, yet, but have seen some of the excerpts. Spamhaus is moving for summary judgment and moving to strike Mr. Lindhart’s testimony.

RoadRunner FBL information

RoadRunner has decided to delay the launch of their new FBL until after the holidays. Sounds like a good idea to me, the launch is never quite as smooth as the ISP wants it to be. People are checking out and trying to troubleshoot the problems while also dealing with all the extra stress and demands of the holiday season is asking for trouble. The good news is that they are now planning on running the two FBLs in parallel for a few weeks, instead of ending one then starting the other.

Light blogging through 2009

There will be some light blogging here through the end of the year. We are headed out for our first vacation in years next week, then will be spending some time with family. I will be blogging before we leave and will try to get some posts written to trickle out while I’m gone.
I hope everyone has a happy and relaxed holiday season. I am looking forward to resting, recharging and returning ready to take on 2009.

Co-reg

Well over half of the clients who come to me with delivery problems admit at some point that one of the ways they collect subscribers is through co-registration. They typically have widespread delivery problems at the major ISPs as well as SBL listings.
John Levine posted over the weekend about his thoughts on co-reg.

Blocking mail to spamcop.net

Josh reports mail from MobileMe to spamcop.net addresses is being filtered somewhere and isn’t being delivered or actively bounced. He asserts that Apple is blocking all mail to Spamcop addresses

Aggregate stats for benchmarking

The great folks over at Mailchimp publish aggregate stats from their customers. This is a useful set of data for senders who want to see how other mailers or ESPs are doing.
One set of stats is the data from

But that's what spammers do!

A few weeks ago I was asked my opinion about a delivery situation. It seems that a sender wanted to mail to a purchased email list. They asked what I thought about getting fresh IP addresses and domains to use to send mail to the purchased list. “We know we’re going to get complaints, probably hit spamtraps and generally have problems with the first few sends of the list. We want to do this without harming our reputation. We figure if we move over to different domains and different IP addresses than we can send this mail and not suffer a reputation hit.”
Uh. Yeah. That’s what spammers do. They split off their mail into discrete sets so that they can spam with impunity and still have one or two ranges that have a good reputation and decent delivery. Some spammers have taken the discrete companies to extremes, and have a series of companies. They purchase a new list and send it through their companies one by one. At each step, they aggressively purge off bounces and complainers. Gradually, they move the list through their steps, resulting in a list that generates few complaints that they can send through their high reputation companies with few delivery problems.
Sure, legitimate mailers can do the same type of thing. But how legitimate can a sender be if they are using spammer tactics? And these are not mailers unwittingly doing something that spammers also do, these are mailers who are using spammer tactics for exactly the same reason spammers do it. They are trying to send mail people do not want, but send it in a way that does not negatively affect their bottom line.
Spammers hide and try to avoid their bad reputation. Legitimate mailers do not.

Mailing old files, part 2

Stephanie Miller at ReturnPath offers suggestions on how marketers can break the rules, mail old lists and reap the rewards.

Confirmed unsubscribe

Whatever one might think about confirming opt-ins I think we can all agree that requiring someone to jump through hoops and confirm an unsubscription request will just annoy that person.
Today I attempt to opt-out from a discussion list. It’s one I *thought* I had opted out of previously, but I could find no record of the request anywhere. OK. So I imagined unsubscribing, I’ll just unsub again and keep better records.
After digging through the headers, I find the unsub link and dutifully mail off my unsubscribe request. I then receive an email that requires I click on a link to confirm my unsub request. This causes me to grumble a bit. I have heard all the arguments about forged unsub requests and the various reasons this is good practice. I believe none of them. Requiring people to confirm an unsubscription request is bad practice.
In this case, the mailing list is a discussion list so there is no CAN SPAM violation. However, I know that some commercial mailing lists have also implemented confirm your opt-out request. For commercial mailing lists, this is a CAN SPAM violation. It’s also just plain rude. If someone says, “Stop!” then you should stop, no questions asked

Old lists have bad delivery

This is something we all know is true, and something that everyone believes. But, Mailchimp has actually published numbers demonstrating just how bad old lists are.