recaptcha
I’m only a couple hours into my day today and so far I’ve received three different emails from three completely different senders, each inviting me to go look at the same exciting erotic webcam site. Each email message came from what I think is a legitimate sender — the latest one, from some sort of online sushi-related website, which I think is owned by some sort of sushi restaurant or delivery service, probably based in France, given the domain name used. I don’t think this online maki maker intended to advertise an adult website, but I suspect that they have open text fields in their registration forms or forward-to-a-friend forms that some spammer is exploiting to send out the gross porn links. And when I, and everybody else, report the mail as spam, the deliverability damage lands squarely on the sushi seller’s domain and IP address. Which sucks.The fact that…
I had a customer ask me yesterday, why is their ESP trying to force them to implement CAPTCHA on their signup forms? They’re not spammers.Well, unfortunately, it’s usually because of stuff like this: As Webbula’s Jenna Devinney explains, bad guys can easily find and script a bunch of pokes at a bunch of webforms, purely to wreak havoc. Maybe it’s random. Maybe it is to annoy somebody they’re mad at. But the net is, they go around signing up Joe Email User for 200 email lists and then Joe Email User starts receiving 200 emails a day that are all spam to him, and it makes him mad. It makes him hate the companies sending that mail, even though it wasn’t really their fault. It makes him report all that mail as spam, and that’ll harm the sender’s IP and domain reputation.Even worse, the bad guys sometimes script submissions to…