[epub] RE: news.admin.net-abuse.sightings and spammer databases

[epub@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Hi Mark et al-

Thank you for your post.

As of today, EZezine.com has resolved our issues
with both Hotmail and AOL.  All of our
mail is making it through. We sent the notice
to our members that you received yesterday,
as a courtesy notification.  It is important
to us that we keep our members aware of what 
is happening with their lists.

As we hand approve each and every application
for membership to our service, we are extremely
cautious about who we allow to use our system.
We turn away upwards of 10 potential spammers
per week.

I'm glad to hear that we have not been posted
on the Google group you speak of!

There are many IP/spammers databases that do not
verify the accusations that they receive.  If someone
files one complaint, the IP is blacklisted!  The
scenario goes like this:  someone forgets that they
opted in to a legitimate ezine, they receive an issue
(maybe it's a quarterly and they haven't received
one in 3 months and have forgotten that they subscribed.),
they report it as spam to one of these db's , and voila,
suddenly the IP is listed in the big-bad-blackhole
list.  Or, someone clicks the "this is spam"
button, and suddenly the IP is flagged. Folks do click
this button instead of unsubscribing rather frequently.

A prime example of a database such as this is
spews.org.  If an IP gets flagged as a spammer,
this particular organization blacklists the
entire subnet, which can be 255 IP addresses!
So, if an ezine delivery service has a dedicated
server, but is on the same IP block as a spammer,
the ezine service, the 200 personal websites, and
anything else that is on that block is marked. As
the IP owner, there is absolutely no way to contact
spews and defend yourself.  Your only solution
is to switch your IP to another block, which
can be messy.

Then the ISP comes into the equation, and subscribes
to a company like spews.org.  Now, no mail coming from the
255 IP addresses is going to get through to that ISP.

While all of these organizations more or less mean well,
they may not be the most reliable sources for decision
making data.

My thought is that your best bet is to contact other
publishers who use an ezine delivery service provider
and ask them what their experience is!  Most sites
have a pool of users who have given their permission
to be contacted by potential users.

Thanks for reading, and I hope that this information
is helpful.

Best,
Lisa Micklin
http://ezezine.com




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