Email Manual
Your Email Resource.
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)
