In 2006 ESP (Email Service provider) e360 insight, who send emails on behalf of their clients sued blocklist/anti spam organisation spamhaus after it listed its domains/IPs as allegedly sending spam.

The UK based Spamhaus did not defend the case which was brought to the courts on the basis of loss of earnings and the ruling was made in their absence. Spamhaus was ordered to pay $11.7m in compensation to e360 Insight, pull the organisation’s blocklist listing, and post a notice stating that it was inaccurate and wrong to say e360 Insight was involved in sending spam.

Spamhaus ignored the ruling and e360 insight responded by calling on the court to order the domain registrars Tucows or ICANN to suspend the spamhaus domains which would have taken the whole blocklist offline however the court denied this request.

e360 claim that 3 billion out of the 6.6 billion emails it sent on behalf of clients were blocked as a direct result of the listing as such a large percentage of mail administrators use the spamhaus blocklist as a method of determining whether a particular email is spam or not.

In mid June 2010, the appeals court slashed the $11.7m ruling to just $27,002 after it said e360 insight had been unable to substantiate its claims for loss of earnings and that the method used to calculate the loss of earnings was unscientific and not backed up by expert opinion.

The $27k was made up of $27000 compensation for loss of one e360 client which works out to be one months additional work that e360 would have had if it were not for the blocklisting and for the loss of two further clients $1 per client was awarded.

The judge also turned down e360 insight’s request of an injunction preventing spamhaus from being able to list e360 again in the future.

On May 3, 1978, The first documented spam message was sent out to 393 recipients on ARPANET. The message was sent by Gary Thuerk and advertised the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computer. Several thousand people were on the ARPAnet then, most of them computer scientists.

Thuerk wanted to send all 600 ARPAnet members on the West Coast of the US an e-mail invitation. He decided it was too much work to send everyone a single e-mail, which was the standard practice at the time, so he decided to send one e-mail to everyone. The reaction from the net community was fiercely negative and earned DEC a stern reprimand from Major Raymond Czahor – chief administrator of Arpanet, but Thuerk’s spam did generate some sales.

Thuerk’s innovation earned him the dubious honor of being added to the Guinness World Records when the term “spam” didn’t exist yet.

Following the first spam message a long chain of discussion between APRAnet users who were concerned about censorship on Apranet occured which can be viewed here.

On spams 32nd birthday despite many ideas, we still have not managed to resolve the spam problem, willl domain based reputation be the answer?

Sources:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Thuerk

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/patterson/18084/spam-turning-30-this-month-no-gifts-please/

Since around 11:30am GMT this morning hotmail has not been accepting any inbound email for hotmail.com, .co.uk live or msn domains.

When an SMTP server trys to make a connection to any of hotmail MX servers the connection is either accepted and then closed immediately or outright rejected.

There is nothing on the hotmail/Microsoft postmaster site to acknowledge the problem at this stage however it has been reported on twitter that it may be down for as long as 8 hours which allegedly came from a Microsoft technical support representative.

Mail server administrators should monitor outbound queue sizes and take measures to protect their email infrastructure in the event that their queues become too large/full.

If you have any further information on the issue please leave a comment so that it can be shared with other readers.

Today Yahoo! confirmed that as of this month they no longer participate in Goodmail certified mail. It has not be confirmed as to why Yahoo! have withdrawn from the scheme but it is well known amongst the industry that Yahoo! have had continued infrastructure issues with their inbound mail and this may be related.

Its not all bad news for Goodmail customers however, last month we reported on a rumour that hotmail were due to start supporting the certified mail scheme. We still believe this is likely to happen.

Yahoo! today announced to the industry today that…

On March 24th, we will decommission the MX record for ‘gms.mail.yahoo.com’, the dedicated domain to which senders have been routing CertifiedEmail for Yahoo! Mail recipients. To ensure no disruption of email delivery to Yahoo!, we recommend clients consult with Goodmail and make any necessary changes to their email systems in advance of this date.

Email Manuals advise is that you should imediately stop sending goodmail certified messages to Yahoo! domains including rocketmail.com and ymail.com as you will not be receiving the benefits which come from doing so. Instead you should deliver mail, uncertified, to Yahoo!’s mainsteam MX records which are published in the normal manor.

Whilst browsing the web for email deliverability related stories that may have broken in the time it took me to drive from work to home I came across an article published only a few minutes ago. The article published on the deliverability.com site claims that today goodmail have announced that Microsoft mailboxes would soon support the goodmail certified mail programme run by Goodmail systems.

If this is true then Goodmail have just added the worlds largest consumer mailbox provider to their list of ISP partners which already boasts Yahoo!, AOL, MySpace and large US ISPs such as Comcast and Cox.net.

Email Manual have been unable to verify the rumour and has not seen any communication from either goodmail nor Microsoft to be able to confirm the claim and at time of writing this there is no mention of it on the Goodmail systems press release page.

That being said, Hotmail/live/Microsoft mailboxes which are rumoured to be around 270 million in volume  would be a huge boost for the company which operates a certified mail scheme which can be optionally subscribed to through ESP’s who are partnered with goodmail.

The scheme which charges ESPs an additional CPM rate for mail destined for goodmail supported inboxes to allow their customers to particpiate claims to have delivered 30-40% better ROI and clickthrough rates for some customers. A customer must be able to demonstrate an existing good deliverability and low spam complaint rate to participate.

The goodmail scheme works slightly differently with different ISPs but can offer some or all of the following benefits:

• Guaranteed to hit the inbox rather than the junk folder
• Images and links turned on by default within the email client.
• A blue certified mail envelope next to the email in the inbox to assure recipients the email is genuine.

For more information contact your email service provider.

Yahoo’s mail servers which handle email for yahoo.co.uk (and possibly other EU domain suffixes) appear to have gone offline a couple of hours ago.

There is no word from yahoo! on the cause or whether the outage is planned or not but ESP’s and bulk mailers should be aware that you will likely build up large queues on your MTA’s and these should be monitored. This is not an issue with your deliverability but instead an outage.

The following servers are affected:

yahoo.co.uk.            449     IN      MX      10 mx2.mail.eu.yahoo.com. – 77.238.177.142
yahoo.co.uk.            449     IN      MX      10 mx1.mail.eu.yahoo.com. – 217.12.11.35

We will update this post again when the servers return.

AOL has today launched a new postmaster site. The new site along with its design revamp contains information on best practice guidelines, its whitelisting policy including the three different types of whitelist available, one of which allows guaranteed delivery (goodmail certified mail) and how to join their feedback loop.

For more information on why you should join their feedback loop click here for our previous article on the subject.

In addition to the normal postmaster information listed above AOL has created an IP reputation check tool.

The tool allows anyone to check on their IP reputation as it is measured by AOL. This is a great feature for bulk mailers.

This reputation check allows mailers to see if their RDNS (reverse DNS) has propagated to the AOL servers, one of the basic requirements to send mail to AOL is to have a valid and resolvable rDNS entry, and a 3 color traffic light indicating the status of the IP:

• Green is good
• Yellow is neutral
• Red is poor
• Grey is unknown (AOL have no data)

AOL say that “Mailers should take time to familiarize themselves with this new site, the valuable information contained therein and update their existing bounce codes/classifications with the published ones. AOL’s quote on their new website.” Sound advice.

You can familarize yourself with the new AOL postermaster site here.

COX.net have launched a new postmaster site.

Lots of ISPs have postmaster pages, but we particually like this one. It’s comprehensive and one of the few that is actually useful to system administrators trouble shooting blocked messages without looking dated on the day it launches like some other major ISP’s postmaster sites.

The Cox postmaster pages provide error code definitions, preferred connection configurations, instructions on how to sign up for Cox’s feedback loop which operates like many others through returnpath. The pages probably won’t give enough information to solve all delivery issues, but they are helpful in getting started and troubleshooting the issues yourself.

Remember, always use the ISP’s postmaster site before sending an email to the ISP’s abuse team, your likely to get a lot better response if you have checked the FAQ’s yourself.

Let us know what you think, post a comment below.

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Today return path and tucows wholesale division OpenSRS have announced a new feedback loop.

For more information on feedback loops see ‘What are feedback loops (fbl’s) and how can they help my deliverability?‘

Tucows is the third-largest wholesale domain registrar, providing Internet services, through its wholesale division known as OpenSRS, for more than 8 million domains. Tucows hosts millions of email inboxes on its OpenSRS Email Service. This feedback loop will cover all of those inboxes.

For a while now OpenSRS and Returnpath have been offering the feedback loop to limited returnpath customers as a private beta process. Now that the kinks and issues have been ironed out this has been made publically available free of charge to parties sending large amounts of mail to OpenSRS members. The feedback loop (FBL) will forward any mail reported as spam originating from the associated IP addresses back to the listed email address given within the application.

The new feedback loop application is available on the following website. http://fbl.hostedemail.com/

For a full list of feedback loops and information on how to sign up, click here.

AOL have today announced that they will no longer be sending report cards to organisations who have a feedback loop with them and that instead these organisations will have to monitor their own reputation.

The report cards used to report to feedback loop owners when any of their IP addresses have exceeded the AOL threshold for the acceptable level of complaints.

This change is effective immediately and the full announcement can be viewed on the AOL postmaster site here:

http://postmaster-blog.aol.com/2009/08/24/announcement-no-more-report-cards/