spam

Meanwhile… I apparently gave chess.com an email address in 2007 – probably due to a client engagement? I don’t know. I unsubscribed from their mail at some point as there has only been one email from them between 2010 and 2021. Maybe this time they’ll actually unsubscribe me.

Madighan Ryan, writing for EarthTalk, ponders the question — what impact does email spam have on the environment? After all, all that server time to process, filter and reject unwanted messages takes electricity and power isn’t free, in the terms of either money or environment consequences. Read more here.

Here’s the tiniest bit of happy news after a week of FTC compliance actions, DNS downtimes and blocklist glitches: Hormel, makers of the beloved food known as SPAM, have kindly donated more than a million dollars worth of the stuff to help Maui wildfire victims. Here’s coverage from NBC News and here’s an announcement from Hormel themselves.

Yum! Is it as delicious as it looks? Alas, we likely will never know, as it it is not real. It’s SMEAT, the fake prop meat product originally created for the movie Waterworld and later re-used in many, many other TV shows and movies.Thankfully, there’s a website where you can learn more about SMEAT: smeat.net. And where did I get this glorious screen capture? From this Youtube video: Adam Savage’s Tested: What’s Wrong With These Products? There’s fun to be had here, whether you’re a fan of movies, graphic design, or just spiced ham and pork products. Hopefully all of the above, like me. Please enjoy.Come to think of it, if the cans of SMEAT were originally made as props for a movie released in 1995, that means that they were probably created in 1994, and if they started out life as real cans of SPAM, and if those cans

Here’s a fun overview of the history of email and spam, if you’re looking for such a thing. I could pick a nit here and there about certain points, but this presentation from Dylan Beattie works well as a solid overview. Enjoy.I do need to point out, just for the record, that it is indeed possible to send mail from cloud services like Google Cloud and AWS. I have servers in both. Indeed, the Spam Resource email newsletter is generated from within a Google Cloud server. But Dylan’s meant to be explaining the usual way things work, not potential workarounds and exceptions. (By the way, if you would like to be able to relay mail out through AWS or Google Cloud, just for hobbyist or personal use, drop me a line — maybe I can help.)[ H/T: Jonathan Shusta ]

These last few years have been something, huh? Something had to give and, in my case, that something was blogging. There were a number of reasons I stopped writing here, many of them personal, some of them more global. I will admit, I was (and still am a little) burned out as it seemed I was saying and writing the same things I’d been saying and writing for more than a decade. Taking time off has helped a little bit, as much to focus on what I really want to talk about. It helps, too, there are a lot more deliverability resources out there than when I started. I don’t have to say it all, there are other voices (and perspectives!) that are adding to the collective understanding of delivery. That’s taken some of my (admittedly internal) pressure off from having to write about specific things to explain, educate and

A few weeks ago, a particular consulting discussion with a potential client ended up not working out — cold leads and purchased lists, which is not really something a deliverability consultant can help with, without a complete 180-degree turn around in practices. Not everybody’s willing to do that.”You can bring a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink,” as the old saying goes. I can only help when my advice is desired and the other person is interested in accepting that advice. And I can’t force it; my advice goes only where it is welcome and wanted.So, life goes on and we move on to the next one. Oh, well. I understand where people are coming from, and that they sometimes face challenges that I don’t face. I hope they’ll eventually come around and want to work within a best practices framework, but for me to try to

A friend recently shared a link to a spammer’s blog post bragging about how what they’re doing isn’t illegal. Weird flex, but OK. Going on your blog and defend your business model that way? “We’re not actually breaking the law! We promise! Cold lead emails are totally legal!” You do what you gotta do, I guess. But remember, farts are not illegal either, and they’re just about as broadly unloved as cold lead email campaigns.So, yeah, duh. Spam is not illegal. I’ve been pointing that out for years – here’s me mentioning back in 2010 that CAN-SPAM does not actually prohibit spam. It’s legal, flat out. But, as an argument to defend bad practices, “this is legal” is a red herring. What you should be asking is: how does CAN-SPAM regulate spam and what does it say about mail filtering and blocking? As I wrote about just a couple of

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

Mashable’s Tim Marcin and others are reporting that a failure in Microsoft’s spam filtering has resulted in Outlook.com (Hotmail) users receiving a bunch of spam in their inbox unexpectedly. Meaning, something broke — a something that would have previously either blocked those messages or relegated them to the Junk Folder.I wasn’t able to confirm this myself; my personal and test Outlook.com addresses are too well protected from public view; meaning they’re not on any common spam lists. I’ve updated my website contact info to use an outlook.com account, so I’m sure I’ll start getting spam there soon. Maybe I’ll be able to observe this for myself. (Hey, that’s aliversonchicago@outlook.com, for all the spambots out there.)This could be causing a unique scenario or two. Not only are bad guys perhaps scrambling to send as much garbage as they can before the spam filter loophole is corrected, but for email sending platforms