3 years of jail for Spam's Godfather.

Alan Ralsky, 64, also known as Spam's Godfather has just been convicted to 3 years of jail.
Convicted for fraud, the affair's originated from Spams he sent with 3 accomplices in 2004 and 2005.

These spams aimed to manipulated the stock prices on the Chinese market by having people buy stocks they had bought and therefor increase their value.

The 3 accomplices were also sentenced prison:
Scott Bradley (48) (Alan Ralsky's step son): 51 months
John Brown (45): 2 1/2 years
How Wai John Hui (51): 4 years and a $500 000 fine

Email Service Provider iPhone apps

How to be a cool ESP?
Be on top of the trends and use all fashionable ways to stay in touch with clients.

After the blog thing (all ESPs have blogs as far as I know), the social media thing (having a Facebook page and a (or several) twitter accounts (if you are curious here's my Email Marketing companies twitter list), it is now highly fashionable to have an iPhone app.

Not that it's useful in any way (even though one might argue that it's always handy to be able to see one's latest statistics on the go), but it's starting to be a big trend.

Among ESPs iPhone apps let's mention:
Exact target
EmailVision
Quickview

There are more probably, these are only the ones I know of and excluding the iPhone's Safari compatible apps.
If I missed on any major ESP iPhone app, please feel free to comment, I'll be glad to edit the post.

New postmaster website at cox

Cox.net just released their new postmaster website.
It is as always full of useful information about best practices to successfully deliver to cox hosted emails and a list of SMTP errors among other cool stuff.

The website is available here

CSI: Emailing

As in Miami, Las Vegas or Manhattan, experts investigate in email marketing to identify malicious activities.
While the CSI experts in the TV show use DNA and fingerprints to get to the murderer, the CSI email marketing spam filters identify spam sources according to sending IP and sending domain.

As someone with no fingerprints nor DNA would be suspicious (or even not living actually) in the eyes of the CSI experts, spam filters ask for a minimum of identifying features to treat you as a regular and honest email broadcaster.

Let's list them once more so everyone is up to pace with it:
SPF, DomainKey and the newly used DKIM.
All this information MUST be found in the DNS settings of your sending domain, failure to provide this information will place you on the suspicious side of the incoming emails.

But, as any other identification process, it has its down side:
If you are a clean, best practices compliant sender, it will open many doors for your emails, if you are more of a dark side of the force kind of email sender, your reputation will probably cost you big time.

This leads me quite naturally to the point I wanted to make today:
When in real life, your fingerprints and DNA can identify you among millions in a good or in a bad way, the traffic incoming from your sending IP(s) and sending domain will be monitored, analysed and kept in the records to put you in a box: good or bad. Don't spoil it all.

Of course some might argue that it's possible to broadcast with a shared set of IPs and shared sending domain, yes it is but do not dare believe you can fool CSI experts so easily (especially Grissom), the links inside your email can also tell on you and to be honest, would you really want to share your reputation with a stranger?