Have you ever sent email using a donotreply@example.com or noreply@example.com from email address? I have done this many times myself, but then the other day I realized that this practice makes no sense, at least for businesses.

Zookoda, a RSS to Email service company has announced that they are going to auction off their service (domain name, source code, etc.).

I got an email from Amazon.com today that said:

We've noticed that customers who have purchased Apple iWork '05 (Mac) are also interested in FileMaker Pro 8 Win/Mac. For this reason, you might like to know that FileMaker Pro 8 Win/Mac is now available for ordering.

We recently did some analysis on our bayesian spam filter corpus (spam assassin token database), and came up with a list of words with a high spam/ham ratio.

By using the spam/ham ratio, and not the spam count, we came up with a better list of words to avoid.

I posted a follow up to an article that appeared in MarketingSherpa called: RSS in Reality: Not a Replacement for Email - Metrics & Best Practices on our our company blog. MarketingSherpa often has some interesting articles, though I'm told this is not the first time they have been way off base.

I just got some spam emails within the last few days that contained ASCII Art messages. This is clever, and they did make it past spam assasin. The last one I got received a spam assasin score of 3.0, a 5.0 is required to classify a message as spam on our server.

A study conducted MailFrontier shows that 92% of the 12,000 people surveyed got at least one question wrong in the 10 question email phishing survey. The study was conducted in the UK.

ReturnPath has announced that they are aquiring BondedSender from IronPort Systems.

BondedSender is a dns whitelist that companies must pay a bond ($$), and go through a TRUSTe privacy certification in order to get listed on.

ClickZ has a good article on how HTML Validity affects e-mail deliverability.

The article points out that AOL is checking for valid HTML in email messages, and will reject mail with a 554 HVU:FO error response.

AOL HVU:FO Error:

Most people know that spammers have robots that surf the net looking for email addresses, such programs are called email harvesters.

Many people don't realize that you can get a free certificate for digitally signing and encrypting email. Thawte is one company that offers a free email certificate service. Once you have the cert its fairly simple to sign or encrypt email.