A lot of folks have asked me about replacements for Delivery Monitor. There are, of course, Return Path and Pivotal Veracity, but many of the smaller mailers I talk to can’t justify the expenditure for either service.

Enter Green Arrow Monitor, a service provided by Green Arrow. This is a new seed list service aimed at marketers that need some delivery monitoring at commercial US ISPs. They’re reaching for the middle of the market. As a bonus, they’re offering special pricing for former Delivery Monitor customers.

While they don’t offer all the bells and whistles of other seedbox services, for the small to mid-size company that wants to know what their delivery is like at the major commercial ISPs this is a worthwhile service to investigate.

Full disclosure – I worked with GreenArrow to look at what parts of the market were being missed by other monitoring services and provide delivery consulting for some of their customers.

Spammers and scammers are attempting to steal money from people attempting to donate money to those in earthquake devastated Haiti. A number of places, including CNN and CAUCE, are warning people who want to donate online to do so through trustworthy links. Don’t click on links in unsolicited emails nor on random websites.

AOL laid off most of their postmaster team. This is going to have a significant impact on sender support provided by AOL. The background chatter I’m hearing indicates that there is likely to be response delays of days to weeks for support tickets.

Pivotal Veracity was acquired by Unica, a marketing software company. Industry buzz says that PV will be run as a subsidiary and maintain their independent customer base.

Spamhaus launched a new website, which includes a link for a domain based URI blocklist. There’s not much information available about this new blocklist, but it’s likely to function similar to SURBL and URIBL.

The lethic botnet was penetrated and disabled. Dark Market, one of the large credit card number trading sites, was taken down and the proprietor arrested.

Does anyone have any reports or links as to whether Return Path are worth the thousands p.a that they charge?

I don’t have any reports or links handy. Anyone have any?

Also, what about competing services like Goodmail and PivotalVeracity?

Have a great weekend all.