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What Happens when Legit Services are Seen as Spam?
AssFace asks: "I run a blog that is dedicated to just things relating to spam (for the most part, the discussion is of how to stop it). I received an e-mail from a reader of the blog today that described the situation he was in.
His words: 'I have a small recruiting business, with about 600 paying clients who are looking for jobs in education. About twice a month, I send an update message to all of them via e-mail. I also send them personal messages as needed. Unfortunately, Hotmail (which a great many of my clients use) seems to think that I am a spammer. With Hotmail's spam blocker set on "Medium," my e-mails go to the recipient's Spam folder.
AOL and Yahoo may be blocking my messages as well, though I'm not yet certain.' I wrote my own thoughts on it and then offered it up to comments from the users of the site. My responses to his e-mail apparently weren't anything that could help his particular situation.
So, regardless of the validity of this particular person's plea, what is a small business service to do if they are blocked by the major ISPs?"
Ironport, the owner of Spamcop, allows you to deposit a bond to certify that your e-mail is legitimate. More info at www.bondedsender.com.
Is Hotmail blacklisting (ie, he can't send even one email there), or is it just balking at the 600 addresses in the cc or bcc list? Many ISP's see such bulk mails as spam, and block them. The solution is simple: send them out in batches of twenty. There are many mail management applications that will do this for you. I ran into this problem myself, and turned Mailgust for batched sending. -Michael Greer
For about a year now, I have tried a new anti-spam approach. Previously, tried black listing, white listing, and etc.
Problem is that the spam keeps coming, and sucks *my* bandwidth.
So I thought about it... And here's what I do. I use a hotmail account. With spam protection. Set to DELETE spam. I use a script (gotmail) to read the hotmail and transfer to my "real" email. Hotmail does a pretty good job on anti-spam, *and* I don't have to bother about the bandwidth.
Once we have a relationship established, you get my "real" email.
And I'm sticking to it. Works for now -- I've only had 100ish pieces of spam in the past year. Note that Hotmail seems to have improved the anti-spam features in the last six months (there was a sharp drop in spam).
If I subscribe to a list, I *only* use the hotmail address. Bet your bippy. I don't *trust* you yet, and I don't know where that email address is going. If the list gets bounced -- I don't see it, and, frankly, I don't care that much. Better than getting hammered on my server using my bandwidth.
My sympathies though... good luck dealing with Yahoo, Hotmail, (__fill_in_the_blank___).
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Our system uses e-mail to notify customers of status changes. For a while, AOL decided that we were spammers, althought that has just as mysteriously subsided. We have had intermittent problems across the board... in part because our messages meet a lot of the standard patterns for spam: includes links, unique identifiers (account numbers), etc. We have tweaked them over time to be less likely to be mistaken for spam, but nothing we do seems to make it perfect.
To get around these problems, we have basically had to implement a private communication system in our product so people see notifications when the log in. For frequent users, this works well enough they can turn of the e-mail notifiers, but for very occasional users, having to log in to see notifications takes a lot away from the ease of use.
Frankly, I don't see a great fix anytime soon: the spammers have taken to copying legitimate e-mail messages into "hidden" text, while the actual spam is delivered via CSS and Image tricks...the battle rages, probably for at least the next ten years (at which point I'm hoping that public key cryptography will allow people to prove they are actually who they say they are) which is why we created a backup communication channel.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Why does the sender have to get on HotMail's global white list? Why can't the receiver put the sender on his own private white list? The story submitter said that the mail goes to the spam box, which means that it gets through, but it gets through & causes inconvenience. Once the recepient adds the sender to the address book, the mail should end up in the inbox. I could be wrong, though.
If these people want jobs, then they have to start being competitive. Learning to use email is a good start. It's important to use problem solving skills here.
testing out my trending skills