Mickey posts on Intellectual Intercourse about spam received from a recruiting agency trying to get him to hire one of their clients. This spam was amusing in that it contained reference to a bill that Mickey helped defeat years ago.

Box of Meat blog links to a CSO online article graphically demonstrating a botnet. The representation is really helps to understand the scope of the problem.

On Bronto Blog DJ posts about resurrecting old addresses. He has it right when he says: “If you continue to send email to customers that is random and unexpected, there will be consequences.”

Matt at ReturnPath has a couple posts about who should get delivery services and how ReturnPath chooses customers. This is something I end up dealing with occasionally. There are not specific types of companies I refuse to do consulting for. I will generally provide consulting on best practices to any business segment. My one restriction is that I will not provide ISP relations (ie, contacting the ISPs) for companies that do not send opt-in email. This has caused consternation with some potential customers.

Mark Brownlow at No Man is an iland suggests renaming “open rate” as “render rate” in an effort to make it much clearer what “open rates” really measure. Expect to see render rates referred to here on this blog in the future.

Josh talks about suppression list abuse on Deliverability.com. For those of us who use unique addresses for every signup, it quickly becomes clear that there are leaks in the suppression process. I have also seen problems with leaks from subscriptions, so do not think the problem is just in suppressions.

• sending out multiple copies of an email to the same recipients
• sending offers from a third party to recipients who did not opt-in for third party mail
• sending mail from a unrecognized address
• sending an offer of no interest to many of their recipients

In addition to the email mistakes, they also made some serious marketing mistakes, such as

• leaving out the branding
• leaving out personalization

The execution of this mailing was abysmal.

I have no direct experience with the EEC, but if they are truly leaders in the email industry, then they will use this experience with email gone horribly wrong as an example. There are lessons here, for the EEC and for all email marketers. Ideally, those lessons will be learned and shared in detail so that other marketers will not repeat these mistakes.

Other articles on this: BeRelevant, Ken Magill, EmailKarma, EEC.

Overall, I think there is room for discussion and feedback between senders and recipients, but on both sides the goal needs to be improving the enduser experience.

And sure, it’s a best practice for filtering companies to respond politely to requests from filterees. But is it a requirement? Do senders have a right to demand explanations?

There is not really an easy answer for that. My first response is “of course not!” but then I think about some of my clients who really have been trying to do the right thing and how we work through issue after issue and finally fix everything I can think of, but they still have delivery problems. These are not spammers, they are sending mail to people who have asked for it and by all measures do actually want it, but some mail is being blocked for reasons neither my client or I can figure out. In those cases it would be really nice if someone from the group doing the blocking would take 10 minutes to point me in the right direction and show me what I missed.

I have been doing this long enough to know that spamfilters are not 100% accurate. I know there are times when a specific block is outside the scope of what email the filter designer, or user, expected to block. Look at what happened when Yahoo started using the PBL a few months back. There was a bug in the implementation that neither Yahoo nor Spamhaus expected and that caused mail from IPs not listed on the PBL to be blocked because of the PBL. With a valid report of the problem, I could contact both Spamhaus volunteers and someone at Yahoo to point out there was a problem with the implementation. Yahoo and Spamhaus figured out the issue and fixed the problem and Yahoo is no longer blocking IPs not on the PBL for being on the PBL.

I do believe that there are times when feedback from senders and blockees is beneficial and can help improve the overall filters. I have clear evidence this is the case.

On the flip side, I also have been in the email business long enough to know that more than 99% of senders just want their mail delivered and do not care about anything other than getting into the inbox. They believe every block is a mistake and the ISP / spamfilter is wrong or broken. They are not interested in actually making sure the implementation of the filter meets the design goals, usually they do not care what the goals of that filter are. They are just interested in delivery of their mail. This creates a signal / noise ratio into the filters or ISPs that is so weighted to the noise side, there is almost no value to the filter or ISP in even having a channel for the small amount of signal.

The reality is that most senders do not spend a lot of time looking into a block before contacting the ISP. They use the ISP points of contact as a way to avoid doing hard work internally. This transfers lot more work onto the ISPs and makes them less conducive to working with any senders at all.

I also think there are slightly different obligations on commercial spamfiltering companies and ISPs in regards to listening to senders. Commercial spamfiltering companies are further removed from the end user than the ISPs are. In many cases the end user has no idea that the spamfiltering at their ISP has been outsourced to a commercial company and they have no internal resolution path. They can contact their ISP, but that is only useful if the ISP has an escalation path back to the filtering company. I think that this distance, and the fact that the spamfiltering companies are profiting directly from blocking mail, means that spamfiltering companies have more of a responsibility to be accessible to the people they are blocking. The irony is that the spamfiltering companies are generally less accessible to senders than ISPs are.

Overall I do not think that good spamfiltering happens in a vacuum, and that reliable reports from senders about inaccurate filtering help improve blocking schemes. Senders are not in a position to be making any demands of ISPs and filtering companies, however, I do believe that the end user experience would be better if there were more communication between senders and recipients. The problem is that the history of communication between the two groups has been contentious at best and there are only so many times the receivers are going to spend time listening to the senders, again.

I guess it boils down to no, senders do not have a right to demand explanations, but things might be better if more ISPs and spamfiltering companies engaged with non-spamming but blocked senders more often. Sorting out those non-spamming but blocked senders from legitimately blocked senders is the real trick and I expect if receivers could do that reliably, there would be no false positives.

The recommendations are what I have been recommending for a while and there is nothing overly surprising in the recommendations.

• Send mail users want and expect
• Separate your mail streams
• Suggest recipients add the From: address to their address book
• Make it easy for recipients to unsubscribe
• Minimize your invalid users
• Use DKIM to authenticate email

All of these are good suggestions for sending any email to any recipient

This also adds AOL to the list of ISPs supporting DKIM. If you are not yet signing with DKIM, you should be planning the deployment path to signing.

Sanford Wallace (the spammer that prompted me to start figuring out how to read headers) lost his suit with MySpace for failure to comply with court orders and failing to turn over documents.

Scott and Steve Richter are in the Washington Post today in an article discussing hijacked IP space. Reading the Post article, though, it appears that Scott legitimately bought a business with a /16 and there is no hijacking going on. Spammers have hijacked IP space illegitimately in the past, but this does not seem to be the case.

It is not just that Postini will not talk with people who are blocked, they will not talk to their own customers, either. Many years ago, I was dealing with another Postini issue for a customer. This customer was a Postini customer and was sending mail to themselves to test their new ESP. Postini was blocking the mail and the customer wanted me to find out why. After a couple days of digging I did actually find a really-o truly-o human at Postini. [1] He explained to me that a single line of text, followed by an unsubscribe link was spam, always spam and nothing but spam. He also explained that the only way for that mail to be let through, was for my customer to turn off his Postini filters.

Fast forward 4 years and I once again have a customer blocked by Postini.  Usually, I tell customers there is nothing to be done for Postini blocks and that no one can find any information about them, but this customer is insistent. This particular customer has extremely clean mailing practices, sends highly relevant and wanted mail and consistently gets 95+% inbox delivery. They are not spammers, not even a little bit. Because I know this customer is so clean, I poked around a little to find some information about them. They do use the ReturnPath Mailbox Monitor so I have a copy of the headers Postini is adding. I also discovered that Postini is now providing a decoder service for their headers at https://www.postini.com/support/header_analyzer.php

The response you get back from pasting in a header is not that useful if you have found any of the numerous explanations of Postini headers, but it does show some willing. Note, there is no way to ask a question or provide feedback to Postini on the listing.

There is not much that can be done to deal with Postini filtering your email. The best you can do is have your recipients whitelist you.

[1] I believe I am the only person on the delivery end that has ever been able to actually talk to a live human at Postini, and I think that is only because I called them from the same area code they are in and some engineer decided to return the message I left on their corporate voicemail.

One is a post over on Eric Goldman’s blog by Ethan Ackerman discussing the Jeremy Jaynes case. It is quite an info heavy post, but well worth a read.

In addition to not having the time to fully read Ethan’s post and understand the legal subtleties he is discussion, I have not quite had the time to blog about two e360 filings that showed up this week.

The first is a filing by Spamhaus’ lawyers asking for the judge to compel e360 to participate in the discovery process. If you remember e360 won a default judgment against Spamhaus for over $11M. Spamhaus filed an appeal and the Seventh Circuit Court upheld the judgment but vacated damages. Spamhaus and e360 were ordered to conduct discovery on the damages.

I would assume that e360 would be eager to demonstrate the amount of damages Spamhaus caused them, but it appears this is not the case. According to the filing e360 has been missing deadlines and even skipped a planned deposition. The exhibits show numerous email conversations between the lawyers, with e360’s lawyers making repeated promises to deliver, and then failing to follow through.

There are a couple statements in the filing that stood out. First, this paragraph which contains a statement that should have e360’s lawyers shaking in their shoes.

Moreover, the posture of this case makes Plaintiffs’ failure to timely respond to discovery even more troubling. Plaintiffs’ Motion for Default Judgment, filed almost 21 months ago on August 30, 2006, included an affidavit by David Linhardt, stating under oath that Plaintiffs had suffered (1) loss of revenue from cancelled active and pending contracts of $2.465 million and (2) lost prospective business opportunities, enterprise value and reputational damage in the amount of $9.25 million. Presumably, counsel’s duties required counsel to conduct a proper investigation of the basis for these claims (including supporting documents) before filing any affidavit in August 2006. And yet now in the course of discovery in relation to Plaintiffs’ damages claims, Plaintiffs are unable to timely provide any evidence to support the assertion made under oath in an affidavit to this Court. If Plaintiffs were able to make sworn statements that their damages exceeded $11 million in August 2006, the evidence and documentation used to make that determination should have been provided months ago.

Reading between the lines, the Spamhaus lawyers have thrown down the gauntlet and pointed out that the information used to calculate the damage amount should have been collected before the case was even filed and if they lawyers did not have that information, they failed in their duty as officers of the court. I expect this means that the number has only a slight basis in fact, and e360 is struggling to justify the number they plucked out of the air back in 2006.

Of other amusement, Mr. Linhardt skipped a scheduled deposition back in January. He just plain did not show up, no notice, no excuse, nothing. An unwise move on his part, but the crowning glory is that in the responses to the interrogatories e360 repeatedly objects on the basis that the questions “ask for a narrative and are better answered in oral testimony.” I will give e360 and their legal staff credit, it takes a lot of audacity to avoid oral testimony by not showing up and avoiding written testimony by claiming you would rather testify orally.

The other legal filing this week was a motion by e360 to have the judge in e360 v. Comcast reconsider his decision. It seems that e360 is convinced that Comcast is acting in bad faith and the judge is too since the judge said “some people may call e360 a spammer.” This statement is clearly true, a lot of people call e360 a spammer. This filing seems to be a prelude to an appeal, talking with some legal folks it seems judges are not prone to saying, “You’re right! I ruled wrong the first time!”

Given e360 cannot seem to manage meeting deadlines for a single case, it will be interesting to see how well they meet deadlines handling 2 cases (e360 v. Spamhaus, e360 v. Comcast counterclaim) and an appeal (e360 v. Comcast). Just repeating the same arguments and statements over and over has not gotten them very far up until now. At some point, they are going to have to actually start proving their cases.

• Transactional & Alerts
• Marketing
• Duplicates
• Duplicates
• Apologies for the preceding duplicate
• Just sending mail so you don’t forget us
• Opt-in confirmations
• Welcome messages
• COI challenges
• Opt-out confirmations
• Apologies and corrections to the broken URL in the preceding email.
• Notifications that we added you to this other list over here, seeing as you’re on this one
• Inscrutable blank messages
• Inscrutable messages that aren’t exactly blank but seem to consist solely of a broken image
• Other apologies, assorted
• Reconfirmations after we got blocked at AOL
• Different reconfirmations while we migrate to a different ESP, ‘cos the last one got blocked at AOL
• Reminders to add us to your address book, especially at AOL
• Cross-marketing for ISPs other than AOL
• Spam
• Mailing to our suppression list by accident
• Viruses
• Not really spam, honest, look, we have an unsub link