Recent Posts

FBL updates

Roadrunner shifted the release date for their new FBL to December 14th.
Despite rumors, the Yahoo FBL is not actually accepting new participants.

Yesterday, on an ESPC call, Mike Adkins of AOL announced upcoming changes to the AOL reputation system. As part of these changes, AOL will be checking DKIM on the inbound. Best estimates are that this will be deployed in the first half of 2009, possibly in Q1. This is something AOL has been hinting at for most of 2008.
As part of this, AOL has deployed an address where any sender can check the validity of a DKIM signature against the AOL DKIM implementation. To check a signature, send an email to any address at dkimtest.aol.com.
I have done a couple of tests, from a domain not signing with either DK or DKIM, from a domain signing with DK and from a domain signing with both DK and DKIM. In all cases, the mail is rejected by AOL. The specific rejection messages are different, however.
Unsighng domain: host dkimtest-d01.mx.aol.com[205.188.103.106] said: 554-ERROR: No DKIM header found 554 TRANSACTION FAILED (in reply to
end of DATA command)
DK signing domain: “205.188.103.106 failed after I sent the message.
Remote host said: 554-ERROR: No DKIM header found
554 TRANSACTION FAILED”
DK/DKIM signing domain: “We tried to delivery your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 554 554-PASS: DKIM authentication verified
554 TRANSACTION FAILED (state 18).”
As you can see, in all cases mail is rejected from that address. However, when there is a valid DKIM signature, the failure message is “554-PASS.”
As I have been recommending for months now, all senders should be planning to sign with DKIM early in 2009. AOL’s announcement that they will be using DKIM signatures as part of their reputation scoring system is just one more reason to do so.

Two reasons not to buy a list

Ken Magill, celebrity, has two articles today that highlight the issue with buying lists from vendors. The first is yet another article about EmailAppenders selling bad data. In this case, it is not the buyers who are complaining. According to Ken EmailAppenders are sending out email advertising they can sell Internet Retailer’s list of 2008 conference attendees. Internet Retailer is disputing this and has sent EmailAppenders a cease and desist. EmailAppenders is currently dodging Ken’s attempts to get their side of the story.
The second is an article about Zoominfo, a new group in the list selling business. Zoominfo has long been harvesting information from other sites. Now, they are offering to sell their scraped and harvested list. Their only requirement is that the buyer sign an agreement to comply with CAN SPAM. And, yes, if someone is dumb enough to buy this harvested list, they should comply with CAN SPAM as sending mail to a harvested list triggers additional penalties if or when the FTC decides to go after the sender.
Not only are Zoominfo harvesting data, they are harvesting from ancient and obscure sources. They have no current information for me, but they managed to find an email address for a job I left in 1993. They have Steve listed as an employee of “postgreSQL INC” because they harvested the postgres mailing list archives. Mickey pointed out one of Zoominfo’s sources is http://free-personal-ads-wanted-sex-partner-near-hays-kansas.themasterwithin.ca/arch/4/. You do not even need to visit that site, just look at the URL!
Zoominfo’s VP and general manager claims they send emails to people regularly, offering them the chance to opt-out. First of all, I have never received one of these, have any of you? Secondly, some of the addresses are so old opt-outs are not relevant. Finally, unless they are monitoring their delivery, which I strongly doubt given their business model, anyone buying addresses from them is going to buy lots of dead addresses. And spamtraps. Lots of spamtraps.
I am sure that people who buy and sell lists regularly will tell me that these are outliers and that most companies who sell lists have higher data collection standards. My experience suggests that these are middle of the road list brokers. They are companies who are willing to sell anything with an @ sign in it and do not care about how sending to that data affects their customers.

Twittering

Yes, I finally succumbed to peer pressure and started twittering as wise_laura. Stop on by and introduce yourselves.

e360 v. Comcast

Mickey has new docs up at Spamsuite in the case between e360 and Comcast.

New AOL postmaster blog

AOL has their new postmaster blog up and running at http://postmaster-blog.aol.com/. Today they announced new tools over there including a FBL checking tool and a block checking tool.

Gmail problems

Some people have been reporting problems with mail to gmail backing up. Steve has some information about the problem.

Bad Idea

My mailbox and IM windows have been swamped with messages about an ISP sending out mail to participants in their FBL program. It seems this particular ISP could use some delivery consulting.
See, this ISP sent out emails with blocks of 50 – 75 email addresses in the To: line. Bad idea. Delivery wise, I do not expect that they had many delivery problems. In the copy I saw, most of the addresses started with “support” and those addresses often have fewer blocks on them than other addresses. I also do not think this ISP will see subscriber emails blocked because of this.
However, it is very, very bad practice to do what they did. And the fact that the ISP can get away with it does not mean that any other mailer can get away with it.

Go vote!

If you are a US citizen, do not forget to go vote today. This is it, the culmination of way too many months of politicking and campaigning. Be part of the finish.

SpamZa fails again

The SpamZa folks have been attempting to use this blog (and probably other blogs) to get out their message that their website can be used to abuse both recipients and senders. They have been having connectivity problems, most likely due to their abuse being unacceptable to the upstreams they could find. Now, faced with the utter failure of their spam people project, they are attempting to post comments ridiculing those of us who were on the right side of this issue.