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Archive for the ‘Abuse Desk Stories’ Category

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Cloudmark Fingerprinting Algorithm

Friday, March 6th, 2009

cloudmark-logo

MailChimp’s abuse desk runs Cloudmark to perform occasional “customer audits.” We basically scan for problem campaigns on our system that might jeopardize the deliverability of our servers. What’s Cloudmark, why do we use it, and how does it work?

Cloudmark is an advanced “message security” system that protects more than 300 million inboxes and works with more than 100 of the world’s largest ISPs and mobile operator networks such as EarthLink, Comcast, Cablevision, Charter Communications, Cox Communications, NTT Communications, Sprint Nextel, Virgin Media and Swisscom, as well as hosted messaging providers, including domainFACTORY and NuVox.

So if you send lots of email marketing, it’s kind of important to know who they are.

But how does their spam filtering technology (its fingerprinting algorithm) work?

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Posted in Abuse Desk Stories, MailChimp News, Spam Topics | 6 Comments »

How to get nabbed by SpamCop for Spamvertizing

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

Here’s a snippet of a SpamCop report received by our abuse desk:

spamvertizing

The backstory is a MailChimp customer sent a campaign to an email list that they collected at an event a long, long time ago (Related: How old lists will kill your deliverability). One of their recipients forgot who the @#%& the sender was, and reported the email to SpamCop.

Forget about the whole issue of whether or not the sender is an innocent victim here, because their list was ‘opt-in.’

What really matters is the sender’s domain name could be tainted, and all their emails (no matter where they send from) could be blocked all over the globe.

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Posted in Abuse Desk Stories, Spam Topics | 6 Comments »

Most Common Spam Filter Triggers

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

We’re working on an experiment in the MailChimp Lab to help us automatically detect when someone’s about to send something too spammy from MailChimp (no, this is not what the supercomputer is for). We’re using Cloudmark, Barracuda, and Spam Assassin (and possibly Postini in the near future). We picked those, because they’re the most commonly used—and vexing—spam filters.

We’re not planning to expose any secret formulas, or help customers “get around spam filters.” It’s more of a behind-the-scenes, “big brother” tool to help us catch exceptionally bad campaigns before they get sent. That’s the idea, at least, and we’re not sure when this’ll go live.

For now, we’re doing research. We’re currently scanning a few hundred thousand campaigns sent through MailChimp over the years, to see how many “false positives” we might trigger.

In the process, we’re uncovering a lot of innocent mistakes made by senders, plus a few surprises.

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Posted in Abuse Desk Stories, Deliverability, MailChimp Labs, Spam Topics, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices | 35 Comments »

Can I Use A Purchased Email List?

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

A lot of people who are checking out MailChimp will call or email us and ask, “Can I use a purchased email list with MailChimp?”

So we created this: http://caniuseapurchasedemaillist.com/

If you run an abuse desk somewhere, and you’re tired of answering that stupid question over and over, feel free to link people to it. If you’re not sure why importing a purchased email list into a 3rd party ESP is a bad thing, then promptly turn off your computer and unplug it from the wall. Thanks.

Posted in Abuse Desk Stories, Ask MailChimp, IMHO | 8 Comments »

Comcast Delivery Tips

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

A couple days ago, Comcast sent an email asking for feedback about their feedback loop. Rare to see an ISP genuinely asking email senders what they think. Anyway, this meant I got to speak with one of their senior spam analysts on the phone today. Now I’ve spoken with a lot of ISPs, and I can tell you this was unlike any other conversation I’ve ever had. Comcast was human. Friendly, even. It was refreshingly Comcastic.

He gave me some tips that I could pass on to our readers. So here you go:

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Posted in Abuse Desk Stories, Deliverability, Spam Topics, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices | 11 Comments »

What makes a good permission reminder?

Monday, October 27th, 2008

A “permission reminder” is a little blurb in your email campaigns (usually in the footer) that helps your recipients remember how you got their email address. In some cases, it can help prevent you from getting reported or blacklisted as a spammer.

Here’s a good permission reminder:

And here’s a bad one from a campaign that received 300+ abuse complaints:

I wouldn’t go so far as to say this “bad” permission reminder is what caused hundreds of abuse complaints. It’s more of a symptom of a much larger problem. But that’s a topic for another blog post.

Back to the original question: What makes a good permission reminder?

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Posted in Abuse Desk Stories, Email Design, Spam Topics, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices | 15 Comments »

Sloppy List Management Practices That Can Get Your Emails Blocked

Friday, August 1st, 2008

At MailChimp, we manage over 65,000 subscriber lists, with over 75 million recipients in them. We’ve seen a sloppy list or two, and have dealt with a delivery problem or two. So we’ve learned a thing or two about how sloppy lists happen, and how to prevent them. Most sloppy lists come from ignorance, not evil. But that doesn’t make it any less stupid. So here are some stupid list management mistakes to avoid:

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Posted in Abuse Desk Stories, Deliverability, MailChimp News, Spam Topics, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices | 5 Comments »

How Tradeshow Email Lists Can Get You Blacklisted

Friday, August 1st, 2008

I run the abuse desk at MailChimp. I can’t tell you how many accounts I’ve had to shut down because of improper use of a tradeshow email list. Seriously, “tradeshow list” is a boilerplate message that I’ve setup in my email program now. The sad part is that tradeshows are supposed to be a great networking opportunity. But too many newbie email marketers mess it up. Here are some tips for dealing with tradeshow lists:

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Posted in Abuse Desk Stories, Spam Topics, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices | 5 Comments »

Growing Your Email Subscriber List With Contests

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

practical-ecommerce-logo.pngJust wrote an article for Practical eCommerce on (The Perils of) Growing Your Email Subscriber List With Contests.

It’s written from an abuse-desk point of view, not a legal or “email marketing strateg-ery” point of view. I’ve had to shut down quite a few MailChimp customer accounts who grew their email lists from contests. Not that contests are bad. There are just a few pointers to keep in mind.

Speaking of Practical eCommerce, they just went through a huge website revamp, and it’s really impressive. If you’re a freelancer, web-developer, or vendor, you might want to try  their new online directory.

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Posted in Abuse Desk Stories, Emarketing, Business, Spam Topics, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices | 1 Comment »

Postini Bug Results in False Spam Reports

Friday, May 9th, 2008

postini-logo.gifLaura Atkins has a lively discussion going on about Postini’s lack of response to deliverability/blocking questions.

We’ve been frustrated and bewildered by random Postini blocks ourselves (see here and here). We gave up on trying to contact Postini a while ago.

But just recently, we had a customer sending tests to their VERY large client, and consistently getting blocked by their Postini filters.

We eventually got (real, live) people from Postini on the phone.
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Posted in Abuse Desk Stories, MailChimp News, Spam Topics | 7 Comments »

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