Recent Posts

Al Ralsky Indicted

Al Ralsky is a very prolific spammer and his name is well known among ISP abuse desks. Along with 10 other people he was indicted today after a 2 year investigation by the Justice Department, according to an article published today by the Detroit Free Press.

Email Marketing for Dummies

Mark Brownlow has an interview with the author of Email Marketing For Dummies. It is a great summary of the book and gives some good hints to anyone interested in starting to use email as a marketing and customer retention tool.

Happy New Year

Blogging was light the last few weeks as I coped with the holidays, visitors and a very nasty cold. I have a backlog of posts I want to write over the next few weeks, including a description of stale list syndrome, information about pitfalls of collecting email addresses at the point of sale, and how to improve your IP reputation.
As I did in 2007, I’ll also keep updating readers to change in Email Standards, continue to update everyone about changes at individual ISPs and comment on the state of the email industry.

SenderScore update

Matt has posted a bit more about the SenderScore Blacklist, following up on my post about the changes at Comcast. George Bilbrey, VP and General Manager, for Return Path followed up with him to explain a bit more about the blacklist. George says:

Success!

A few weeks back I posted about changes a client of mine was making in order to improve their IP reputation and their delivery.
They are now getting inbox delivery at the major ISPs. Their actions are up and they are seeing great results.
They did not implement all of my specific suggestions. Instead, they took the underlying advice, and modified it to fit their needs. They took my advice to increase relevancy and engage their recipients, then applied their own knowledge of their recipients and made changes to their mailings. The result is lower complaints, better delivery and more responsiveness.
Clients are happy. Recipients are happy. Everything is good.

Changes at Comcast

I can usually tell when one of the ISPs makes some change to their incoming spam filtering just by my call volume. The past few weeks the ISP in most of my calls has been Comcast. And, what do you know, they have made changes to how they are filtering email.
According to their bounce message, Comcast is using ReturnPath’s proprietary SenderScore product to filter mail. Reports on thresholds vary, but IPs with SenderScores of 70 and below have been blocked with messages similar to:

Best practices and ISPs

A couple articles came out today talking about ISP requirements and how to find them.
EmailInsider talks about ISP best practices and how merely complying with CAN-SPAM is not enough to get good delivery at the ISPs.
Meanwhile, over at ClickZ, Stefan talks about what the ISPs want from you and how to find the information online.

Email standards at the email client

The Email Standards Project launched last week. This group is looking to lobby and encourage companies to make their email clients comply with HTML display standards. They are also identifying how different clients display email with HTML. Check out their website, and see what they’re doing.
I do apologize for the light blogging recently. I have a couple big deadlines on my plate. I hope to get back to regular blogging soon.

Why does everyone tell you to avoid .biz in your emails?

… or Why do spam filters sometimes have some very strange ideas?
It’s been dogma for a long time that if you’re doing email marketing you should avoid using a .biz domain in your mails. Even if your main website was in .biz, you should use something different in your messages, perhaps a website you buy solely for use in email that redirects to your real .biz website. Last year I looked at why that was, and what could be done about it.
One main reason for avoiding it has been resolved (so if you’ve been avoiding using .biz URLs in your mail now might be a good time to re-test that decision). And enough time has gone by that I can share the ugly reasons as to why .biz was considered a sure sign of spam without good reason for so long without upsetting everyone.
The simple reason was SpamAssassin. SpamAssassin is very widely used to filter mail, both in it’s open source version and buried anonymously deep inside countless commercial spam filters and filtering appliances. Not only that, but SpamAssassin is readily available, so most people looking to do pre-mailing content checks or looking at why content-based filters are objecting to a particular email will use SpamAssassin as their model. It’s very widely deployed, and influential far beyond the size of it’s deployed base.
SpamAssassin is a score-based spam filter – it checks an email against hundreds of rules, adds up the scores of each rule that matches and, in typical setups, decides the mail is spam if the total score is five or more. Pretty reasonable, but here are a few of the rules and scores (from the 2006 version of SpamAssassin)

Useful websites

I’ve been working on a document discussing laws relevant to email delivery and have found some useful websites about laws in different countries.
US Laws from the FTC website.
European Union Laws from the European Law site.
Two documents on United Kingdom Law from the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Data Protection Laws
Canadian Laws from the Industry Canada website.
Australian Laws from the Australian Law website