ZDnet recently posted a report from Commtouch about how spammers and hackers seem to be trending away from botnets, and going after compromised personal email and social accounts instead (hotmail, gmail, facebook, etc).  They found that of the spam sent from Hotmail, almost 30% came from compromised accounts. Perhaps not so coincidentally, Hotmail just released a new “my friend’s been hacked” reporting mechanism.

Even though these reports center around personal webmail services and personal social accounts, ESP customers should look into beefing up their security as well.

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With so many high profile data breaches being reported these days, we hear a lot of talk about the importance of a good password.  Unfortunately, the best password in the world can’t prevent you from being spammed.  We thought it would be nice to highlight an underused feature of our top three ISPs: disposable email addresses.

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MailChimp has some pretty special users, and Portland band The Decemberists is one of my favorites. Their music is awesome, their newsletters are beautiful, and look! They’re responsible email marketers! Yesterday the band’s lead singer tweeted this:

We couldn’t agree more.

Sign up for The Decemberists’ newsletter here.

Related: Warning Signs That Your Client Is Spamming

Below is a common question that we get on the topic of deliverability. I’m posting our response because we’re getting this question so much lately. By the way, the comment about one of our competitors (whether it’s true or not), is also why we don’t have sales quotas at MailChimp. Heck, it’s why we don’t have sales people here at MailChimp. Their goals sometimes get out-of-sync with the truth (I blame this on upper management, not on the sales people themselves). Anyway, here’s the question:

Hi MailChimp,

My name is [NAME] and I am the Marketing Director of a Group Buying site in [COUNTRY] ([COMPANYNAME]).

I am currently looking to upgrade our Email Marketing System and am in conversations with [COMPETING ESP]. I have never used [COMPETING ESP] and have used MailChimp.

[COMPETING ESP] seem to think that they can gaurantee 20% better deliverability than MailChimp. Is that something you can disprove? How can you disprove this (e.g. comparison of technology, types of examples)

We will be sending many emails by the end of the year (in excess of 200 million). Can you guys effectively handle this type of volume?

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Some interesting stuff from Ken Magill.

If you’re interested in anti-spam topics, and you enjoy reading long technical documents composed in the courier font inside very tight margins (like I do), be sure to read this article about a best practices document that some blocklist operators have been working on since 2004:

“In any case, for those who choose to slog through it, BCP 07 offers insight into the way the major blacklist operators think”

I don’t handle our abuse or deliverability stuff anymore at MailChimp (much smarter people have taken over) but I remember the early days, when the behavior of just one MailChimp user would get our entire IP range blocked somewhere, and we’d have to jump into public forums and beg forgiveness (then endure all the ridicule) before getting delisted. It’s matured so much since then.

I also remember dealing with blocklists that banned MailChimp, but they were mysteriously also blocking the entire Internet too. So I found this interesting:

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