Recent Posts

Subvert the dominant paradigm

I am very slowly getting back into the swing of work and reconnecting with colleagues and other delivery folks, both on the sending and receiving side. On the sending side, there are multiple discussions happening about how senders can best communicate with receivers how much spam blocking by ISPs impacts legitimate businesses.
This is one of those perpetual issues, popping up usually around the time of conferences where both senders and receivers pop up. Senders are frustrated by the amount of their mail that is blocked, receivers are frustrated by the amount of mail that isn’t blocked and by the complaints from their users. The sender solution is to attempt a dialog with receivers, where they can tell the receivers how much legitimate mail is blocked. Receivers respond by avoiding senders as much as possible.
The impasse annoys everyone and doesn’t do anything to get mail delivered. I challenge both senders and receivers to find a new way to relate to each other this year

MAAWG agenda published

For those of you who are MAAWG members, the agenda for the February meeting in San Francisco has been published. Who is planning on attending?

Legitimate list vendors

In this week’s Magilla newsletter, Ken provides a number of ways to identify a bad email list vendor. His suggestions are not only appropriate for list vendors, but are also a good way to screen mail partners, customers or even vendors.

Court rules for Reunion.com

Today a California judge ruled against plaintiffs suing reunion.com. Venkat has blogged about the case previously, and has an analysis of the ruling. The crux of the case is reunion.com requesting users provide passwords to email accounts and then sending mail claiming to be from the user to all the addresses in the users address book.
According to Mediapost:

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