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Industry News
News from the Email Marketing and deliverability Industry as well as news on trends on email use.
Important information for users of spamassassin.
Aug 25th
Recently it has been widely published that bl.open-whois.org, a blocklist which was included within the default install of spamassassin has been taken offline and is no more.
Users of the open source spamassassin application started to report that emails were being marked as spam wrongly. Upon investigation it appears that the domain open-whois.org had fallen into the hands of cyber squatters, presumably because the previous owner of the domain did not reregister the domain.
Although the cyber squatter probably didn’t take on the domain for any malicious reason, it does mean that they have the ability to control the DNS servers for the domain and return results which could cause spamassassin to block and/or bounce inbound emails scanned by spamassassin at worse case, or the best case is that spamassassin will have to do unnecessary lookups to a non-existent blocklist which will cause up to 60 second delays for each inbound email.
As I write this the domain is completely unresponsive to DNS requests and is not returning false positives but Email Manual advice to users of spamassassin would be to reconfigure spamassassin to not check the bl.open-whois.org blocklist to prevent this issue from impacting your inbound email.
This can be done by either upgrading spamassassin to 3.2.x version of spamassassin or by removing any rules which mention bl.open-whois.org from the rules/72_active.cf file within your spamassassin installation folder.
spamassassin 3.2.x is available for download here.
No more report cards/reputation alerts from AOL.
Aug 24th
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/
Fox News reports Americans receive unsolicited email from the Whitehouse. +1 for double opt-in.
Aug 24th
Last week fox news covered a story regarding Americans receiving emails from David Axelrod, an advisor to the president with regard to health care.
In a press conference featured below Major Garrett (senior White House correspondent for the Fox News Channel) quizzed White House Press Secretary “Robert Gibbs” about the emails received by people who claimed they had not opted to receive emails from the White House and had not engaged in anyway with them. The response from the Robert Gibbs who was clearly uncomfortable with the line of questioning was just that he needed the email addresses of the people concerned to be able to check on the status of their subscription to the White House updates and did not speculate how these email addresses may have been added to the White House email database.
Whilst the emails sent by the White House were CAN-SPAM compliant. It was almost certainly unsolicited, in the US however this does not make the email illegal.
The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 does not require mailers to prove opt-in; instead they must provide the ability to opt-out and political emails are also excempt from the act.
The Answer:
The White House said Sunday night that it will change its e-mail sign-up procedures, making subscription clearer, after some recipients of a health-care e-mail complained that they had not asked to receive updates.
This is all very well and good, and its great to hear that the White House is improving its email practices. However wouldn’t the press conference have gone so much smoother if the White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs was able to say that the White House operated a double opt-in scheme? This would have removed any doubt that they had emailed someone who did not want to receive their emails.
A double opt-in scheme is when an email address is added to a list such as the White House list, the email address concerned receives an email with a link to click to verify that the owner of the email address does want to receive updates from the organisation concerned. Although common practice, many email senders still have not introduced double opt-in, potentially concerned that people won’t verify themselves as subscribers. The counter argument to this however, and one that Email Manual subscribe to, is that if people genuinely want to receive updates from you they will verify themselves when they receive an email from the organisation concerned.
What do you think? We would be interested in seeing your comments.
Radio Netherlands World reports change to Dutch Spam legislation.
Jul 20th
Radio Netherlands World logo
Radio Nederland Wereldomroep (Radio Netherlands World) reports that there will be a change to the Dutch spam legislation in October.
The economic affairs ministry says all spam e-mails will be against the law in the Netherlands from October. It was already illegal to send spam e-mails to private individuals but the ban will be extended to cover companies as well.
Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs in the Netherlands was reported as saying that the change will result in Dutch firms that send spam being fined upto 450,000 euros.
Source: RNW (http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/dutch-ban-all-spam-e-mails)
Googlemail and the new anti-phishing key.
Jul 13th
Googlemail which came out of beta last week has today announced a new anti-phishing key.
The new key is designed to give googlemail/gmail users confidence that emails they receive from financial organisations are in fact genuine rather than spam or phishing emails attempting to dupe them of their account details and ultimately cash.
The key will be shown next to the from name of the sender when Google knows that the sender is genuine. This will in turn provide confidence to end users that the email is safe to open and click on.
The key (shown below) is similar to the blue envelope used by Goodmail certified mail which Yahoo! and AOL are partnered with. Goodmail can be used by any sender who is partnered with an ESP capable of sending goodmail certified messages provided their spam complaint rates fall below the Goodmail acceptable spam complaint threshold.
New Gmail anti-phishing key.
The google scheme however will likely be free but limited to a small amount of organisations for some time until it can be rolled out to a wide range of senders effectively by Google.
The idea of the scheme is that google will display a key icon next to mail it knows is genuine. Google say the following criteria must apply for a sender to be considered for the new scheme:
- The sender must be DKIM signing their outbound email
- The organisation sending the email is a target for phishing scams
- Google must be rejecting all other email claiming to be originating from these senders.
Right now this new feature is not mainstream and instead is available from within the Googlemail Labs section of the site and is restricted to only protecting users from email claiming to be from paypal or ebay at the moment.
If you have a googlemail/gmail account and wish to turn this feature on you can do so by Turning on “Authentication icon for verified senders” from the Labs tab under Settings.
Google hope to expand this feature in the future and allow more senders to join this scheme.
To read the google blog post on this new feature click here.
