The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which is the new Federal anti-spam law, only applies to commercial email. It does not apply to the private, personal email which you send

In a move which surprised many, but others not at all, Scott “I am a legitimate businessman” Richter, and his Evil Twin Scott “I am the King of Spam” Richter, of OptInRealBig, sued SpamCop and Ironport over a recent SpamCop listing of OptInRealBig. Ironport, manufacturers of the Ironport email sending…

The term “address harvesting” refers to the unsavoury practice of finding and copying email addresses from the pages of websites. You know all of those lovely “contact us” webpages which everyone has? Well, spammers just love to pick those tasty little ripe email addresses from the orchard of your website. So here are a few tips which will allow users to contact you through your website, while not allowing your email address to fall into the wrong hands.

Spam filtering has always been a hot topic around the IT water cooler. The question most frequently asked is “how”. But increasingly, a question which needs to be asked is “whether”, followed closely by “how not” in addition to “how”. (If you’re stilll back at “why?” then a) I want…

I’ve been testing Google’s Gmail for 5 days now, since April 18th. Woohoo. In addition to openly soliciting email to the account, and even posting the address on the web, I’ve forwarded all of my email coming to my other accounts to the Gmail account. I wanted to give Gmail…

Everywhere you look, everyone is talking about Gmail (including me). But what’s amazing to me is that for the most part those who are heralding it have had only the most glancing access to it, if that. Those who are actually test driving it are … :gasp”… barely whelmed, let…

Today I received email with the subject line: “urgent query” The opening lines were: “Dear Madam, I am writing to you out of great desparation.” So, here’s the test: Do you think that this email was spam, or not? Perhaps I should have asked this instead: Is there a one…

In a law rife with grey areas, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, one of the greyest is the requirements surrounding the handling of opt-outs, and the related creation of suppression (“do not email”) lists. This is a responsbility which falls squarely on the shoulders of the marketers..er, the postmaster..no, wait,…

As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, Google’s Gmail’s “sophisticated spam filtering technology” isn’t. And I’m beginning to wonder about their AdSense technology as well.

Anyone else seen this? Spam in the past 24 hours, almost certainly all coming from the same source, with, I have to admit it, creative ‘sender’ names. Names like: Amateurism B. Sophocles Unmindful J. Mejia And my favourite: Visualizing I. Nappies (eeeewww!) Now if only they made the middle initial…

Somehow, I lucked into having a Gmail beta account (who knew I had friends in those high places?) Here are my first impressions: First, Gmail doesn’t work with Safari; very annoying. It does, however, work with Firefox. I also found it frustrating that you can’t set up a forward, or…

Quick! Where on the Internet were you on April 13, 1994? Many of you are probably saying “Dude, I hadn’t even heard of the Internet in 1994! Had Al Gore invented it yet?” Others of you, however, will remember that date, exactly 10 years ago today, as being the day…

Today I received a third..or maybe fourth, who knows, perhaps even fifth – I’ve lost count – piece of spam from, of all places, ISPCON. No, I did not ask to be on their mailing list, no I did not give them permission to put me on a mailing list,…

Much has been made in the past dozen days about Google’s announcement of their new service, Gmail. First, the press release was leaked on April 1st, leading to wide speculation: was it an April Fool’s gag, or was it not? (It wasn’t.) Then nobody could believe that the world’s largest…

You know those pesky bounce notices you get when a spammer forges your domain in a spam run? Hundreds, even thousands, of bounce notices sent by ISPs all over the world, kindly letting you know that the person to whom the mail was sent doesn’t exist, is over quota, or…