australia
Australian internet service provider (ISP) and telecoms provider iiNet Limited (aka TPG, Internode and Westnet) is getting out of the email business.Instead of an outright shutdown, the core iiNet email services are being transitioned to “The Messaging Company” and after a possible period of free service (through September 15, 2024?), users will have to pay to maintain that email service.Multiple sources report that users are upset; for among other reasons, email aliases will not be transferred to the new email service and will be lost.Senders, you’re likely to see an increase in bounces at the iiNet domains as users abandon ship; surely not all of them will pay to transition to the new service, and even for those that do, they may lose some email aliases. You might want to reach out to iiNet users as soon as possible and offer them the ability to register an alternate email address.Should you
Australian telecommunications provider Telstra has long provided internet services (including email), initially via the “Bigpond” brand (launched in 1996, later retired). They’re reported to have 18.8 million customer accounts, though I don’t know how many active email accounts that translates to. Even if you assume a 1:1 correlation between user accounts and email accounts (which is unlikely), that’s still quite a bit smaller than, say, Yahoo Mail (which was reported as having 225 million active users as of 2017). Regardless, a multi-million subscriber base is nothing to sneeze at.I don’t have much information on blocking/unblocking information for senders with Telstra/Bigpond delivery issues at this time. I’ll add information here as I’m able to.In the mean time, if you are having a Telstra/Bigpond-related deliverability issue, and if you would like to segment out or suppress mail to the Telstra domains, here’s a list of their primary email domains:telstra.comtelstra.com.aubigpond.combigpond.com.auTelstra hosts email for
From Bleeping Computer: A woman in Australia was arrested for sending over 32,000 emails to a Federal Member of Parliament, impacting systems enough that people weren’t able to do their normal jobs as a result. She faces charges that could result in a prison term of up to ten years. Read more.Is 32,000 a lot of emails? I guess so, for a regular mailbox. Here I am today, deleting 12,000 messages out of this mailbox, 6,000 out of that mailbox, times about a hundred, for the various deliverability tracking stuff at work, so it doesn’t seem that overwhelming to me. Back at my last job, I had Gmail test mailboxes that would occasionally fill up and I’d be deleting upwards of 150,000 messages at a time. But still, I probably wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that have to work around it to get to the emails
Compliance with spam laws is still a necessary thing, you know. And failing to follow the rules can get really, really expensive.A few weeks ago, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), the Australian regulator of media and communications, announced that online gambling company Sportsbet will have to pay $2.5 million (AUD) in fines and that they have “committed to refund customers around $1.2 million (AUD)” to settle spam allegations.The ACMA investigation “found Sportsbet sent more than 150,000 marketing text messages and emails to over 37,000 consumers who had tried to unsubscribe. Sportsbet also sent over 3,000 marketing texts that had no unsubscribe function.”Read more about it here from the ACMA (and you can find the enforcement notices here).[ H/T: Highstakes DB ]