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Spam – One Billion Served at Project Honey Pot

By Kevin Huxham on December 16th, 2009

I received an excellent study today from the folks at Project Honey Pot about Spam.

Project Honey Pot was created in 2004 by Unspam Technologies, Inc and they have built a community of tens of thousands of web and email administrators in more than 170 countries around the world to help track online fraud and abuse. They also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers. Recently, they received their 1 Billionth Spam message to one of their trap addresses and to commemorate this milestone they decided to release the data they have accrued over the last 5 years.

There are many fascinating things in this study, for example.. Did you know Monday is the busiest day for Spam and Saturday is the slowest? Assuming the average size requirement for a spam email is 4KB, over the last 5 years the total storage requirement imposed on the Internet by just the spammers sending the top-20 spam campaigns was over 2.5 petabytes! If you don’t know what a petabyte is, it’s BIG (roughly 2.6 million Gigabytes). Lastly, it’s interesting to note that in 2008 there were virtually no Facebook phishing messages, but today Facebook is the second most phished organization in the world and predicted to be #1 in 2010.

For the complete study, click here.

Project Honey Pot is still a little behind McDonald’s, who apparently served their 1 Billionth hamburger back in 1963 and although the menu has changed a bit, today’s estimate has them well over 100 billion! Let’s hope Project Honey Pot is successful and we don’t see the same kind of growth with spam!

Bye for now and Happy Holidays,

Kevin

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Exciting times in Canada – Bill C-27 moving forward

By Kevin Huxham on October 23rd, 2009

The PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) has been around for some time, but sadly Canada has never really dealt directly with the issues of Spam, phishing, spyware and malware - until now.

Several key clauses of Bill C-27: Electronic Commerce Protection Act were passed in this week’s Standing Committee Meeting which will reconvene on Monday to bash it out again. Here’s a rundown of the main requirements put forth that will affect all commercial emailers:

  • Prohibits the sending of a commercial message to anyone without the recipient’s prior consent and this includes messages asking for the recipient to “opt-in”. Commercial-based messages may be sent if the sender has a prior business relationship with the recipient, but only if that period does not exceed 2 years.
  • Unsubscribe requests must be processed within 10 business days, which is consistent with CAN SPAM and was met with some opposition by the Bloc but eventually passed.
  • Mandatory content that includes information enabling the recipient to readily contact the sender (ie: full mailing address with postal code and phone number), also consistent with CAN SPAM.
  • Penalties for violations are still yet to be ironed out but the CRTC has given power to impose a penalty of $1,000,000.00 for individuals and as high as $10,000,000.00 for any other person. It also gives the right for individuals to sue spammers.

If you would like to listen to a recording of this week’s meeting, click here.

It is difficult to say when and in what form this new piece of legislation will finally be put into law, but one can only hope it does not come out a shadow of its former self. These are important times and if you would like to join Neil Schwartzman and the other fine people at CAUCE (The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email) with me in joining your voice in support of Canada’s C-27 Anti-spam Legislation please click here to sign their petition.

Stay tuned… and bye for now,

Kevin

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Blacklists and Spam Reporting Services are our Friends

By Kevin Huxham on August 27th, 2009

Today, I wanted to talk about blacklists and spam reporting services, also what you can do if you’ve been listed.

First off, a lot of people think blacklists are the bad guys, when in fact it’s the exact opposite. The feedback they provide is not only valuable to help ISPs keep spam out of your Inbox, but they can also alert you (the sender) to potential problems as well. You should think of it like your child’s report card in school, if your child fails a class wouldn’t you want to know about it so you can help them?

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Yahoo or Hotmail use these services to help determine if the email you are sending them is Spam. If they receive spam from you or too many people complain, they will send your email to ‘Junk’ or just delete it. These services let you know if anyone on your list did not remember signing up and/or they are not happy receiving your emails anymore (perhaps because they requested to be removed). All of this helps protect your delivery and allows you to judge the quality of the list so you can take action.

What Can I do?

If you have been listed, you first need to look at your mailing list (or segment) and decide whether or not it is still worth using. Strengthen your sign-up process and make sure it’s crystal clear. If you have no relationship with the people on your list, or you are using a publicly available or purchased list – it should be discarded. If the list is legitimate and made up of people who have opted in to receive your email from you directly, then perhaps it is time to reconfirm they want to stay on your list. If the list is old, or you haven’t used it in a while (+6 months), or people are no longer interested in receiving your email – the list should be “cleaned”. This is done by sending an email asking if they want to keep receiving emails from you. If they do not reply, they should be removed. You can also put a link in the email asking them to click if they want to stay on your list or better yet, visit your website to sign up again! The people who are left would remain and anyone that didn’t reply or click should be removed. Depending on how often you send emails and how big your list is, this should be done every few months.

Bye for now,

Kevin

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Thinking of Using an ‘Old’ List? - Part 3: List Cleaning 101 and Hardbounces

By Kevin Huxham on May 4th, 2009

Previous posts:
Thinking of Using an ‘Old’ List? - Part 1: The Risks
Thinking of Using an ‘Old’ List? - Part 2: Prepare your Re-Opt in Email

Hi again, in my last post we talked a bit about reviving old lists and dealing with hardbounces, but I never really got into how important they are. Sure, most people know what a hardbounce is, but I don’t think many people know what kind of an impact sending to them can have on your deliverability.

Very simply a hardbounce is a bounce generated when you send an email to an address that does not exist. It may have existed in the past, but not anymore. Just like calling a phone number that’s been disconnected, you usually get a recording saying “This number is no longer in service..” – which is effectively the same thing. The big difference is, the phone company doesn’t block the rest of your outbound phone calls because you dialed too many wrong numbers!

ISPs look very closely at the number of hardbounces a sender generates. Too many from a given network can indicate a potential Directory Harvest Attack and ISPs will put up a block (usually done automatically) to prevent slow downs which may cause further harm to their users. Have you ever sent an email to a friend and wondered why it took so long to get there? Think about it, if an ISP is being bombarded by millions of spammers trying to validate a list of a ‘gagillion’ addresses, it’s going to slow down the legitimate email from getting through and people will inevitably start complaining.

In order to prevent these blocks, it’s very important to keep your list(s) up-to-date. This means sending on a regular basis and removing hardbounces as you go. CakeMail automatically does this for you, but if you haven’t used the list in a while or like we talked about last week, you’re thinking of using an older list, you need to be very careful. As a preventative measure, which we’ve also mentioned several times, you should be confirming any new leads. When somebody signs-up, you should (at the very least) be sending that address a Welcome email. Not only will this prove they have access to the address, but it will get rid of hardbounces right away and prevent you sending a whole bunch at once. It also gives you an excellent opportunity to send them your From address for Whitelisting and thank them for signing up in the first place!

Bye for now,

Kevin

If you have any questions, Kevin can be reached at: postmaster@cakemail.com or feel free to use our Help Desk.

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Thinking of Using an ‘Old’ List? - Part 2: Prepare your Re-Opt in Email

By Kevin Huxham on May 1st, 2009

Previous post: Thinking of Using an ‘Old’ List? - Part 1: The Risks

Here’s some good advice when preparing your re-opt in email:

  • As with any email, make sure to have the clearest “FROM” possible so they can always identify you
  • Be sure your “OBJECT”/”SUBJECT” is clear and doesn’t look like spam
  • Reconfirmation emails should not contain advertising content of any kind
  • Tell them precisely how you got their email address, so they understand they had previously subscribed
  • Give them precise information about the type of content you will send them and the frequency of mailings they will receive. Informing you subscribers is also a good idea when you make any changes to the type of content or frequency of your mailings, or to your company name, website, logo, etc.
  • Be able to fulfill your promises before you ask people to subscribe
  • Make them want to sign up! Create emails that are as ‘attractive’ as possible to get them interested in subscribing
  • Be clear that you are updating your list, and that they will need to “Subscribe to your newsletter” by clicking on a link. If they don’t do this, they won’t receive anything from you.
  • Add some links to your Privacy and Anti-Spam policiess
  • Give yourself some time to receive your subscriptions. You can add the date of the first mailing in the email so they know how much time they have to register if they want to receive it. Late responses will be subscribed to future mailings
  • Don’t be discouraged if you don’t receive much feedback from your users. It’s a good idea to couple your move with a ‘subscription campaign’ on your website to reinforce the interest in subscribing;
  • Discuss this process with your ISP. We at CakeMail will help you plan your mailing and also discuss with ISPs to ensure you won’t have any problems

If you have any questions, Kevin can be reached at: postmaster@cakemail.com or feel free to use our Help Desk.

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