Spam Resource

How Subscriber Complaints Affect Inbox Placement

2012-05-17T10:44:00.005-05:00

Over on the Return Path blog, Joanna Roberts explains how spam complaints ("report spam" clicks) at the big ISPs and webmail providers can damage your sending reputation, and offers up ideas on what you can do to prevent these kinds of issues.

Engagement – Buzzword, or a rule to live by?

2012-05-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

In the third part of this on-going series, Neil Schwartzman explores the current landscape of the email delivery world. As regular readers may recall, in my early posting “You Get the Deliverability You Deserve” I made mention of a 2010 international consumer survey conducted by industry group MAAWG. It had some distressing results for senders of commercial email. Basically, end-users don’t

What does your email address say about you?

2012-05-14T09:13:00.001-05:00

My wife and I enjoy eating out for dinner fairly often, and it can get kind of spendy. On a whim, I started searching for ways to save money while dining out, and stumbled across this service called Savored. Looks like a neat way to save some money-- I've just registered, but I have yet to try it. I was reading through their blog and found this wonderful post, "What does your email address say

Read the Comments

2012-05-10T15:26:00.003-05:00

Read this one comment in particular, from somebody who is currently blacklisted by Spamhaus. Some choice excerpts: By the way, over time, Spamhaus has blacklisted many of the Fortune 500 for simply using email as a marketing channel But why do so many in this industry feel that the email channel should be somehow held to a higher standard than other direct marketing channels? The reason for our

Neutraceutical Spammer Sentenced to 2 Years

2012-05-02T11:12:00.000-05:00

John Levine shares his tale of the sentencing of Brian McDaid, "Neutraceutical" spammer. Looks like it is indeed possible to get jail time for violating CAN-SPAM.

MAAWG: Internet Police?

2012-05-01T11:33:00.000-05:00

I just read in Mediapost's Online Media Daily that the debate over email append got heated at the recent MediaPost Email Insider Summit. Jordan Cohen, vice president of business development at Pontiflex, was direct: "[Email append] is not really okay to do." He cited industry group MAAWG's condemnation of email append, saying that MAAWG had a de-facto stake in defining "law" when it comes to

CASL Slips to 2013

2012-04-30T10:11:00.001-05:00

The Financial Post reported last week that Canada's new anti-spam law won't actually take effect until 2013. (Hat tip: EmailKarma.net)

SMS Spam: Google Voice is Helpful

2012-04-25T08:00:00.000-05:00

That we can now report SMS spam to various wireless carriers is a good thing, but the process is still overly complicated and I'm doubtful that enough people take the time to report SMS spam received. I have Verizon Wireless, and the spam reporting robot gets confused and, for example, won't accept a spam report about a message received from a short code. One hopes that gets addressed at some

Spam Complaints Matter

2012-04-20T11:52:00.001-05:00

When you're fighting spam, you reach out to a lot of different people. If you received spam and you're savvy enough, you send it to the ISP from whence it originated, and ask them to take action to make the spam stop. If you work for an ESP or a blacklist group, you might reach out to the sender and ask them to prove that this person opted-in, with details, in order to resolve the "he said, she

A flippant, but true, response.

2012-04-02T11:15:00.004-05:00

Almost every time a sender I'm talking to is dealing with a Spamhaus issue, they ask me, "Why now? Why did I get blacklisted today, when I've emailed this very same list three times previously." The answer I have, might be kind of flip, but I think it's appropriate: "Do you get a ticket every time you speed?" Maybe your data changed, but maybe not. Maybe you drove too fast in the wrong place at

5 Design Tips That Will Lower Your Spam Scores

2012-03-29T14:53:00.000-05:00

Reputation is where it's at -- that's what I tell clients. After all, the vast majority of ISP spam filtering engines are fueled by data relating to your sending reputation -- complaints, bounces, and engagement. But even with that, people still often ask about content, which isn't necessarily my area of expertise. So, instead of telling you whether or not it's safe to use the word "free" in a

Whitelisting – A partial solution to Inbox Woes?

2012-03-28T08:00:00.001-05:00

Things have become a little more tenuous in the email ecosystem of late. What was once a given, inbox placement is now hard fought. Way back in the year 2000, blacklists had so many false positives, inadvertently (and sometimes intentionally (vertently?)) blocking email from legitimate senders that the notion of whitelisting sprang up with the creation of Habeas.com. Habeas was based upon the

Inside the Gmail Kimono: A Whole Lotta Nothing?

2012-03-21T09:46:00.000-05:00

Gmail yesterday announced and unleashed a new way of doing things. They will finally tell users why stuff is in the spam folder, and there has been a lot of excitement in the sending world that there will finally be some clarity at Gmail as to their bulking policies. All told, there is, and there isn't. Ela Czajka, a software engineer made a posting entitled “Learn why a message ended up in

Why did Gmail junk that message?

2012-03-20T09:47:00.000-05:00

Gmail now tells you why it decided to junk a particular email message. Looking at my voluminous spam folder, every piece of spam I've received seems to have the reason "Why is this message in Spam? It's similar to messages that were detected by our spam filters." That's not necessarily all that insightful to me personally, but from reading this CNet article, it seems that other reasons are

Send Less Mail, Make More Money

2012-03-12T14:49:00.001-05:00

Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Representatives from fashion designer Nicole Miller shared that unsub rates have dropped and revenue jumped, all thanks to reducing send frequency, from three emails each week down to one single weekly email. This shows that that over-saturating your recipient base causes subscriber fatigue; it makes those subscribers less interested in what you're selling. At its

Who invented email?

2012-03-06T11:05:00.000-06:00

Not this guy, apparently. Writes Gizmodo: "Shiva Ayyadurai didn't invent email—he created "EMAIL," an electronic mail system implemented at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, New Jersey. It's doubtful he realized it as a little teen, but laying claim to the name of a product that's the generic term for a universal technology gives you acres of weasel room. But creating a type of

You Get the Deliverability You Deserve

2012-03-05T07:07:00.000-06:00

You might know Neil Schwartzman. In his long and active career in email and anti-abuse, he once-upon-a-time handled compliance issues for Return Path certified senders, has consulted with other senders looking to comply with Canada's recent anti-spam legislation, and has long been one of the driving forces behind anti-spam advocacy group CAUCE. Now a member of the sender community via his new

Does Hotmail use the SBL (Spamhaus Block List)?

2012-03-01T10:52:00.000-06:00

Yep, Hotmail does indeed use the Spamhaus SBL as part of their spam filtering and blocking system. I received a report yesterday of this specific SMTP error response received: "550 OU-001: Mail rejected by Hotmail for policy reasons. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your Email/Internet Service Provider for help. For more information about this block and to request removal

A wizard did it.

2012-02-29T09:54:00.000-06:00

Did a wizard do it? No, it was engagement. Mickey Chandler: "If you already have a good program, then mailing inactives isn’t likely to hurt you much. On the other hand, 6 or 8 times per month I’ll see a client who is having their mail delivered to the bulk folder trim their sends back to their most highly engaged recipients and things start appearing in the inbox again. The reason why isn’t

It's not all spam, is it?

2012-02-22T13:52:00.000-06:00

Over on the Mainsleaze blog, Catherine Jefferson points out that the Obama campaign is sending mail both to an address she purposely signed up to receive their mailings, and also to a spamtrap address. What does a reputation system do with that? What should it do with that? If it's a reputation system that deals with just individual spamtrap hits, then that IP address is now tagged as having a

What's DMARC?

2012-01-30T11:36:00.001-06:00

Return Path's Sam Masiello explains: "The genesis of DMARC was actually a private partnership between PayPal and Yahoo! and Google. They worked together in 20007 and 2008, respectively, to create a communication channel that would allow Google and Yahoo! to block all email purporting to be from a PayPal domain. It had a huge positive impact. At one point they were blocking, on average, 200,000

Address Validators: What are you Validating?

2012-01-25T11:04:00.004-06:00

Laura Atkins wrote this really good post yesterday talking about email address validation, asking the question, "Can you verify email addresses in real time?" In it, she highlights her poking at a specific address verification service, immediately finding an example of how it identifies a specific handle of hers as a valid address when it isn't. I've talked about email address validation for a

If the email’s legal, it can’t be spam. Can it?

2012-01-23T07:25:00.000-06:00

Answering an important, and often-raised question by senders finding themselves blocked, Mark Brownlow explains that no ISP is going to let your mail through just because it is CAN-SPAM compliant. Read all about it here.

CheetahMail "Gives Up" Email Append

2012-01-19T08:33:00.003-06:00

Over on the Email Responsibly blog, Experian CheetahMail's Ben Isaacson explains "that Experian CheetahMail believes that opt-out email appending is no longer an acceptable practice, and that marketers should no longer use this practice to acquire customer email addresses." For those of us banging the best practices drum every day, this is fantastic news. For an email service provider like

Still Delicious in 2012

2012-01-05T13:34:00.001-06:00

Link-sharing site Delicious may have changed owners last year, but my account is still alive and chock full of deliverability-related links. Click here to check it out. Append a keyword to a URL if you want to bookmark a certain section. For example, if you want to bookmark all of my links to Comcast or Gmail-related info, you would want to bookmark http://delicious.com/deliverability/comcast or