Stay tune. I am back

It has been a long time since i am back. I am currently with an outstanding UTM company and here i promise more frequent update on threats not just on email and spam but on the whole data communication world. Stay tune for the upcoming. "Emerging threats and its platform"

Difficulty sending to Yahoo??

Recently i have been hearing quite a few complaints about customer not being able to send mails to Yahoo. It either ended in the Junk/Bulk folder, it was delay for several hours before deliver or it just went to the twilight zone. Yahoo has tighten up it's measure against SPAM over the years against SMTP connections that do not conform to good mailing and Internet standard practices.And the recent trick it has against SPAM has no doubt caused an impact on innocent sender. But not to worried, there are way to increase your mail deliverability to Yahoo and I will show you the various methods you can use.

Yahoo mail itself has recommended that you do the following;

* Remove email addresses that bounce
* Examine your retry policies
* Pay attention to the responses from our SMTP servers
* Don't send unsolicited email (duh!)
* Provide a method of unsubscribing
* Ensure your mail servers are not open relays.
(Source: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/basics-55.html)

But there are 2 important method i believe that would also help in getting your mail through but wasn't listed above. These two methods are Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKey Signing.

Check out DKIM in my previous posting. I will elaborate on SPF in my next post.

Back to Basic: What is SPAM??

I talked to someone yesterday and i realized that many people doesn't know the origin of SPAM and just know SPAM as an irritating mass sending of emails.. well i guess i can do a little introduction of SPAM here.

SPAM is an Hormel developed America's first canned ham (''Hormel Flavor-Sealed Ham'') in 1926, and eleven years later .. ok ok, I am kidding. The type of SPAM we are referring to is not the canned food as mentioned above. Let get serious.. SPAM as you people already known is a form of electronic mail send in mass volume containing irrelevant or inappropriate messages to a large number of newsgroups or users. What you may not know is that the first SPAM was probably sent by a marketing guy name "THUERK" from DEC System in 1978 with the subject "ADRIAN@SRI-KL" and the first response to the SPAM might be from "MAJOR RAYMOND CZAHOR,CHIEF of ARPANET MANAGEMENT BRANCH, DCA" ( Source : http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html)

SPAM counting back from the date of it's birth is about 30 years old. Bill Gate once mentioned at the World Economic Forum ‘2004' that SPAM would be dead by year 2006. But one in the year of 2009. We can obviously see that not only SPAM is very much alive, it is getting stronger and more vicious. SPAM is taking up 80-90% of the world email traffic and causes companies to loses billions of dollars yearly.

SPAM started off as pure text has now evolved into SPAM containing images, scripts, virus, etc... It started off as 10% of the world email traffic and has now become 80-90%. It is causing companies more network bandwidth, more human resources to handle the SPAM and more cost in getting rid of the SPAM.

More n more countries has implemented LAW in order to control SPAM. In 12 April 2007, Singapore implemented it's Spam Control Act. This mean that there is a legal framework before Mobile marketers and e-mail marketers send out their next unsolicited marketing message, or spam. Any violation of the framework would result in potential financial penalties of between $25 for each electronic message sent, or up to $1 million.

With the penalty in place, marketeers out there, do know the legal framework before you hit the 'send' button next time.