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Posts Tagged ‘spam’

MailChimp Helps Bail Out Mailman Steve

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

Mailman Steve Padgett, age 58, stood before a Federal Court judge recently to receive his sentence. The crime? Delaying and destroying the very mail he was supposed to be delivering– third class mail, or more commonly, the JUNK.

This spring, authorities were contacted by a utility worker who noticed what appeared to be an excessive amount of mail piled at Steve Padgett’s home in Raleigh. When postal authorities went to investigate, they discovered third-class mail stacked in Padgett’s garage and buried in his lawn.

According to Padgett’s attorney Andrew McCoppin, it wasn’t a conscious stand against waste or a junk mail protest that spurred the mailman to hold onto the mailers. Rather, it was the inability to meet the demands of a job in a growing part of the county while contending with heart problems and complications from his diabetes.

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Posted in Deliverability, MailChimp News, Spam Topics | 19 Comments »

Major Spam Source Knocked Offline

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

Is your spam folder surprisingly empty this morning? This might be why:

Major Source of Online Scams and Spams Knocked Offline (Washington Post)
“We looked into it a bit, saw the size and scope of the problem you were reporting and said ‘Holy cow! Within the hour we had terminated all of our connections to them.”

And have you ever wonder how spammers make money anyway? And how much?

Study shows how spammers cash in (BBC News)

“After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted…the response rate for this campaign was less than 0.00001%…these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period,” said the researchers.”

So how do spammers send so many emails, anyway? If they can do it, there must be some legal loophole allowing anyone to do it, right? So that means we can all buy emal lists and blast out spam. Right?

Um, no. Spammers have to hijack computers to do their dirty work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet (scroll down to “Formation and Exploitation”)

If spammers can get away with this, then so can I, right?
They don’t. And no, you can’t:
Authorities Shut Down Spam Ring (NYtimes.com)

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Posted in Spam Topics | 1 Comment »

Fugitive Spammer Kills Wife and Daughter

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

Ken Magill reports on a disturbing story of a spammer who escaped from prison and killed his family:

http://directmag.com/magill/0729-suicide-spammer/index1.html

Includes interesting back story about a vendor that once worked with that spammer.

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Posted in Spam Topics | No Comments »

Warning Signs Your Client Is Spamming

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

warning-signs-your-client-is-spamming_thm.jpgWeb designers and developers: ever help a client with an email marketing project, then started to get this weird, uneasy feeling in your stomach that maybe—just maybe—you were helping your client spam? You were probably more concerned about your karma, but did you know it can also hurt your client’s email reputation (and potentially yours?). Once that happens, good luck getting your email delivered, no matter what server or service you’re using.

At MailChimp, we’ve had to shut down quite a few creative agencies for their client’s bad email habits. Sadly, most problems could have been easily prevented.

We’ve posted a free PDF guide (9 pages): Warning Signs Your Client Is Spamming.

The free downloadable guide covers how to tell if your client is crossing the line, and how to gently guide them back over from the dark side (without losing the project). More specifically, we go over:

  • The most common reasons we’ve had to shut down agency accounts at MailChimp
  • The industries (your clients) that always seem to have the most risk (and why)
  • How to define spam in words your client will understand, and how to determine when a client just needs a punch in the gut
  • How to detect inexperienced clients who may be doing things to get themselves (and you) in trouble

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Posted in Emarketing, Business, MailChimp News, Spam Topics | 2 Comments »

How Fast Can Spammers Harvest Your Emails?

Monday, February 18th, 2008

FTC Spam Summit Harvested Emails

Reading through the FTC Spam Summit Report (472k PDF), I came across an interesting study they did, buried way back in the Appendix.

To determine how effective ISP spam filters are, they created 150 fresh new email addresses, and posted them at 50 locations around the Internet:

“The 50 Internet locations included websites controlled by the FTC and several popular message boards, blogs, chat rooms, social networking sites, video posting sites, and sites with user-generated content that had high hit/visit rates.”

Then they measured how much spam they got, how fast, and how much their ISPs’ spam filters blocked…

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Posted in Deliverability, Spam Topics | No Comments »

Roadrunner Domains Bouncing

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

Roadrunner ISP logoMailChimp customers: If you’re seeing a large amount of weird bouncebacks from Roadrunner, it’s because Comcast took over some of Roadrunner’s email domains (click here if you’re having issues with Comcast bounces).

More details can be found at Word to the Wise (a great deliverability resource, btw)

The bad Roadrunner email addresses were automatically removed by MailChimp when they bounced back, so there’s nothing you have to do. Note that you can’t just take an old @roadrunner.com address and switch it to @comcast.com.

Let Your Customers Submit Change of Email Address
This might be a good time to look into adding an “Update your profile” link to the bottom of all your MailChimp newsletters. That way, when your customers change their email addresses, they can log in and update their information on your list if they want to continue receiving your campaigns.

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Posted in Deliverability, MailChimp News | No Comments »

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