Canadian Anti-Spam Act (a.k.a. Bill C-27) update.

The canadian Anti-Spam Act discussed several times on this blog recently, has passed committee review and was referred back to the Canadian House of Commons, intact, at 17:30 Monday.
It should now be quite soon that the Canadian people have their own anti-spam bill.

Here are two posts on my blog discussing the subject:
Canada to pass an anti-spam act
Canada towards an anti-spam act

If you want to learn more about the background of this law and its upcomming challenges, I advise you to read Matt's post on EmailKarma.

Spam me please

Hello all,

I'm currently analyzing spam and how it reaches our inboxes.
I am also checking the way users are protected by ISPs.
To do so, I have created several emails that I post on the web to see how spammed they will be according to where they are posted or registered.

Please note this is not a benchmark I'm doing, it's just to get some information and a better understanding of spam propagation.

Here's the list of 'honeypots':
antonbook@orange.fr
antonbook@live.com
antonchecking@yahoo.com
antonchecking@gmail.com
onlineposting@antonbook.otherinbox.com

New look for the blog

Hello all,
It was finally time to change the look and feel of the blog.
The update is now over, there might be a few tweaks to be made in the following days but nothing major.
I hope you like it as it is now :-)

Responsys Acquires Smith-Harmon Inc.

Let's continue with the series of events in the 'small' world of ESPs, Responsys just announced they bought Smith-Harmon.
Responsys is known to be a global provider of on-demand marketing solutions on email, web, print, mobile, and social media channels.
Founded in 1998 the acquisition will help Responsys "strengthen the company's ability to help marketing organizations with the strategic planning, creative design, and execution of integrated, cross-channel marketing programs."

Sherpa knowledge for all

Marketing Sherpa jsut released their new Email marketing benchmark report for 2010.

This report contains a lot of very useful information, including an entire Chapter dedicated to "Email Economics in a Recessionary Economy".

I can only advise you to download this - free - report on the sherpastore and to read it thoroughly.

New ESP in France

ContactLab, an Italian ESP just opened an office in Paris, France.

Well implanted in Italy it's a big challenge for this company attacking a market where ESPs are already numerous and well implanted (Cabestan, Experian CheetahMail, Emailvision and eCircle just to name a few).

Let's see how this new pure player can get hold of pieces of the French cake.

As I speak about ContactLab, let's mention their latest study the 2009 E-mail Marketing Consumer Report which is available in several languages including English.
The report is available here

Canada towards an anti-spam Act

I already talked about this back in February on a blog post called Canada to pass an anti-spam act.
The first elements of this act have been discussed this week in Standing Committee Meeting which will reconvene on Monday.
It is good to hear that Canada (last of the G8 countries not to have an anti-spam act) is speeding up.

More information is available on CakeMail's blog and Retunrpath's blog

IBM + Outblaze = Lotuslive iNotes

IBM bought back in April Outblaze's messaging assets, they are now launching Lotuslive iNotes, a new email service.
The new postmaster and abuse emails are both @lotuslive.com.

No changes yet to the Outblaze services (Feedback Loops, email hosting,...) but it's likely that at some point a lot of things will be merged.

Talking about feedback loops, those already registered to Outblaze's FBL will start receiving feedback from the lotuslive domain (on the fblbounce@fbl.mail.lotuslive.com email).

A dedicated FBL program will probably soon be available (and will then be added to my list of available feedback loops).

Postini down (again)

Computerworld made a post talking about yesterday's troubles on Postini protected emails.
Apparently some emails were blocked when they shouldn't have and all mails (or close to) were delayed.

The issue impacted mainly U.S. accounts.

This probably had an impact on yesterday's email marketing campaigns broadcasted on Gmail (but not only) domains.

You can read the original post here

Returnpath's gloomy and scary tale for halloween

A very nice post on returnpath's blog tells us about an old blacklist (blacklist.us), left for dead but with its IPs re-attributed to someone else who, fed up of receiving still lots of queries for the blacklist has set it to reply the IP is listed on all queries!

I can only advise you to read the post, enjoy

The FTC approves Adobe's deal to buy Omniture

What a week for the e-marketing world!
After Experian who buyed United MailSolutions last week, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission approved Adobe Systems's deal to buy web the analytics firm Omniture for $1.7 billion ($21.50 per share).

This deal is supposed to help measure web activity on flash websites.

More (economical) information on the Reuters website

Internet ad revenues are going down for the first half of '09

The IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) just released a study on their website about Internet Ad revenues for the first half of 2009.

If the Internet ad revenues ($10.9 billion) are going down by 5.3% versus the same period last year, the decrease (blamed on the economic crunch) is less important than on any other media around.

For more information you can download the report here

Experian buys United MailSolutions GmbH

Experian continues it's shopping among European ESPs, the latest: United MailSolutions (former Falk MailSolution), a german ESP, they just bought for an undisclosed sum.

We can probably imagine it will have a great impact on the German market (mainly).

For more information you can read the official press release (Date 01-Oct-09).

It's not the first time Experian buys a "local" ESP to gain shares of the market, they already bought EmailingSolution a couple of years ago to grow CheetahMail to the French and Spanish markets (being back then "only" operating in the USA, England, Ireland and the Netherlands.

Spamhaus and snowshoe spammers

A very interesting post has been made on wordtothewise on Spamhaus' new black list.

This blacklist is supposed to identify spammers using their own (instead of compromised) IPs to send out spam.
Of course we are talking about a huge number of IPs there.

The post explains fully the concept of snowshoe spammer and the new blacklist's principle.

Very interesting blog post, a "must read" as I reckon.

Q3'09 Spam & Virus Trends from Postini

Google posted today the Q3'09 Spam and virus trends as monitored by Postini.

There's a lot of interesting information.
Among other data, there is a link to Postini's best practices to optimize the spam filtering.

The post is available on the Google Enterprise Blog:
Q3'09 Spam & Virus Trends from Postini