spam
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
The other day, I talked about the spam seemingly sent by a local aldermanic campaign here in Chicago. When I talked about this spam on Facebook, one of the folks pushing back attempted to lead me down an existential rabbit hole based on the theory that we just can’t know whether or not a given email message is spam. That it is literally impossible to know with absolute certainty whether or not a single email message is unsolicited. Which is yet another one of those (possibly) correct but (definitely) not very useful kind of responses. Let’s break it down.First, let’s get this out of the way. Yes, it’s absolutely true that there is no “this message is unsolicited” flag or email header in an email message, allowing anyone, at a glance, to immediately know, whether or not a given email message is spam or not.The recipient has a pretty good
Do you receive political spam? Political spam happens in the US, seemingly regardless of party, but it is not something universally engaged in, nor do I think that it is something broadly welcomed, even if some tolerate it.My own personal experience is varied. Back in my Miami Beach days, I dared to sign up for local government LISTSERVs to get warnings about hurricanes (when should we leave town?) and notifications of upcoming events in the area where I lived (where’s the live jazz?). A number of unscrupulous folks seem to have obtained my email address from those signups via FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests and then added me to lists for their various candidacies. I vigorously reported all of those unsolicited messages, knowing that most best practice-abiding email sending platforms do not intend to allow lists to be built in this way, and specific mail stopped. Sometimes an overzealous candidate
Well, Figgy Pudding Spam is a thing that exists, apparently. Laurel Wamsley for National Public Radio explains that this limited edition concoction is apparently so popular, that you may have already missed your opportunity to purchase it this holiday season. Oh, well.Incidentally, the SPAM brand just turned 85 years old, says Hormel.
UW-Green Bay professor Michelle McQuade Dewhirsta turns spam emails into into songs for voice and cello. Wisconsin Public Radio’s Jonah Beleckis explains. I don’t know how I feel about this. It is indeed creative, I’ll grant her that.
I try not to do a lot of “name and shame,” but when something like this hits the news, it’s important to let the world know, to remind us that sending unsolicited marketing email can indeed come back to bite the sender in the rear end. In this case, it’s UK bike and car accessory retailer Halfords, fined nearly $35,000 by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office’s for sending just under half a million unsolicited marketing email messages. Read all about it at the Register.
Dear Colleagues at ESPs, We have a problem. More specifically, YOU have a problem. You have a spam problem. One that you’re not taking care of in any way, shape or form. There was a point where ESPs started caring about spam out of their networks. They got blocked enough they had to take action. Because they took action a lot of the big blocklists started being nice. Spamhaus, for instance, would do ‘informational’ listings so that ESPs could fix things rather than going to a direct block. This led management at ESPs to start to think they had this spam thing under control. They stopped worrying too much about spam and compliance. I mean, to management the whole point of having a compliance desk is to stop the blocks. No blocks mean no problems with spam out of the network, right? As someone who gets a lot of B2B