Our friend Rudy recently learned first-hand why it’s always best to use a current, opt-in list for email marketing.
Think you might need a refresher?
Role addresses are not people
Posted by Ben on
When you import a list into MailChimp, we reject any “role” addresses that might be on the list. I’m talking about emails like webmaster@, info@, sales@, etc. Instead, we’ll give you a message that looks like this:
so if you have role addresses on your account that you know should receive your email marketing, we make you manually input those addresses.
That’s because role addresses are built for functions, not people…
Project Omnivore: Declassified
Posted by Ben on
In late 2008, MailChimp Labs began Project Omnivore. Our goal was to build a massively scalable tool for our abuse team that could predict bad behavior.
The experiment started with an nVidia Tesla supercomputer, then grew to a cluster of Amazon EC2 servers running a genetic optimization program for 2 weeks nonstop, running over 61 trillion email data comparisons.
This article shares some of the results of our experiment, and where the technology is taking us…
Cloudmark Fingerprinting Algorithm
Posted by Ben on
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?
How to get nabbed by SpamCop for Spamvertizing
Posted by Ben on
Here’s a snippet of a SpamCop report received by our abuse desk:
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.