Recently in email Category

I'm moving domains around to different servers. Last night I moved mag-sol.com. Except I did a spectacularly bad job of it. Oh, I moved the web site. And the subdomains. But I completely forgot that mag-sol.com is where all of my mail ends up (even if it's sent to dave.org.uk). So I forgot to set up a mail account on the new server.

This morning I was a bit surprised to find that Thunderbird couldn't log into my mail account. Of course, the DNS updates had propogated overnight and it was trying to log into a non-existant account.

I quick bit of panicking this morning and I think I've got it all working again now. But if you sent email to me in the last twelve hours and you got a bounce message, or you don't get a reply today, then you might consider resending it.

See, this is why I'm not a sysadmin.

Update: Still a few problems apparently. Looks like procmail isn't working on the new system yet. Which means that a) my mailing list email isn't getting filtered into the correct mailboxes and b) spamassassin isn't processing my mail.

Might be best if I just ignore email today.

I've seen some cheeky 419 mail in my time, but this one (which arrived over the weekend) is the first that claims to be from a British MP and former minister.

Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2007 5:06:03 +1000 [31/08/07 20:06:03 BST]
From: "phewitt@parliament.gov.uk" <saleimh1@bigpond.net.au>
Reply-To: patriciahewitt1992@yahoo.co.uk
Subject: Patricia Hewitt MP

Dear Friend,

I got your contact after a search for a person with whom I can entrust
with a charitable projects.

I am Patricia Hewitt, the last Secretary of State for Health here in UK
before the present one Alan Johnston. I like to introduce a project
that will get to do with charity in your country and any neighbouring
country around you: Please let me know what your response will be to an
offer to receive charity investment funds in cash if you will understand
the fact that I have my reputation and intergrity to protect as the
last Secretary of State for Health here in UK.

1. The said fund amounts to Seventeen Million Five Hundred Thousand Dollars
(US).

2. The said fund is in cash and will be make available to you in same
state.

3.The fund is intended to be invested into any charity organisation
through your agency in the said purposes within your country.

4. This transaction will result to you being paid a commission of 30%
off the investment capital and the balance destributed to charity
organisations of your choice or reinvested and the net income used for
rehabilitating charity organisation in and around your country through your
agency annually for the period of some time at least five years or
above.

5.You must understand that I desire absolute confidentiality and
professionalism in the handling of this project and as a result of that and
for security reasons to my reputation as the former Secretary of State for Health
under her excellency Queen Elizabeth, I will not be able to always
communicate with you but my lawyer will take up the processing on my behalf
and get the funds processed and released to you without any delay.

I'm a person that has a very big heart for the less priviledge people
which is one of my top priority which is to positively uses my office to
affect the life of so many people which is why I am doing this. I am
not in any way going to benefit from this transaction financially but I
will be very happy if you will be sincere with me to handle this
project with utmost sincerity and confidentiality and use the funds for the
purpose which I have above explained to you.

Please respond urgently if you are interested so I can give to you the
details of my lawyer and commence the transaction properly and please
if you know you are not ready and trust worthy person, please don't
reply this message.

You can check more about me out at
http://www.patriciahewitt.labour.co.uk/ but the website is presently
under mentainace due to the high rate of fraudulent activities but you
can also check more about me out and google.co.uk and please do not try
to contact me through any of my personal information you may lay your
hand on the internet because all my phones are connected to the British
House of Parliament data base and if the British government get to know
about this funds, our effort to get the funds secured for the purpose
of charitable investment plans will be jeopardise. But you can call me
on any of my number you can get on the internet for normal greetings and
do not try to introduce yourself or discuss this transaction but just
call to make sure I'm trully what I tell you I am for you to be sure
that this transaction is free from scamers.

Please send your response to this E-mail: patriciahewitt1993@yahoo.co.uk

Sincerely.

Patricia Hewitt MP,
former Secretary of State for Health
233 Owen Walk,
London SE37 88AQ
http://www.patriciahewitt.labour.co.uk

Have you ever inherited an email address? It's a very strange experience and it's happened three times to me.

The first time was when I worked at a small dotcom company and was given the address dave@small-dotcom.co.uk. It turned out that the same address had been used by a former employee who had left some time earlier. He still had a number of mailing list subscriptions though and once my mailbox was active it soon filled up with information about things he was interested in but I wasn't. Took me months to unsubscribe from them all.

Then when I started at this bank I was given the address david.cross@large-bank.com. In this case, the address was still warm from the Chicago-based research analyst of the same name who had left only a couple of weeks earlier. I get invited to all sorts of fascinating meetings in Chicago. Oh, and my previous incarnation played a weekly hockey game with some friends and each week a mail discussion would start about whose turn it was to bring the beers. They actually turned quite aggressive when I suggested that a geek from London wasn't actually interested in their sporting activities.

The third time has just happened. Over the weekend I saw that davecross.co.uk was available, so I registered it and pointed it at the Magnum Solutions web site. But almost immediately I started getting spam to that domain. And then I got a couple of mailing list messages. It seems that someone has been using that domain fairly recently.

So I fancy a bit of domain name archeology. What can I find out about the previous owner of the domain? There seems to be nothing in Google's cache and the Wayback machine doesn't have anything either. Maybe I'll just wait and see what mail turns up.

Does anyone else have any suggestions?

Very worrying article in today's Guardian technology section. We all know that spam levels are constantly increasing but this article says that 91% of email is now spam. It then goes on to put at least some of the blame on the people who connect completely unprotected PCs to the internet. These PCs then get attacked and taken over by Trojan horse or worm programs which place many of the PC's resources at the resources of unscrupulous people who can then use the PC for various nefarious purposes. These networks of compromised PCs (or "botnets") are increasingly being used to send spam. And there are literally millions of these PCs out there. Which means huge amounts of spam.

ISPs and PC vendors need to do a lot more work to educate people into protecting PCs that are connected to the internet. Currently it seems that the vast majority of PC owners have no idea of the problems so they just carry on regardless. The article contains a guide to checking to see if your PC is being controlled in this way. Everyone with a PC connected to the internet[1] should be encouraged to go through this procedure and then to install decent firewall software.

[1] Well, at least, those running Windows. Computers running Linux or MacOS aren't immune, but they aren't often targeted as so many people run Windows that it offers far greater returns.

A few months ago I changed the way my email server works. Instead of using POP3 to download the mail and then filtering it on the client side using procmail, I configured the system to filter the mail on the server side so that I could read mail using IMAP. At some point during that change I broke the Spam Assassin set-up so that Bayesian filtering no longer worked. The upshot of this was that I was suddenly getting an extra 150 or so pieces of spam that were ending up in my inbox rather than being shunted off to my spam folder. This was most obvious in the mornings when I'd always wake up to 70 or 80 unwanted messages in my inbox. Despite this being an annoyance, it never became enough of an annoyance for me to spend the few hours it would take to fix it.

Then this morning I found only ten or so spam messages in my inbox. My immediate response was to think that there was some kind of problem with my mail server (the recent trackback denial of service attacks have made me sensitive to problems like this and the constant stream of spam is a useful heartbeat to monitor).

But once I'd woken up a bit more I realised that that wasn't the problem. Actually there wasn't a problem at all. All that had happened was that yesterday I had finally got round to upgrading to version 3 of Spam Assassin (only 18 months after it was first released!) And this version is much better at catching spam than the old version. So I'm seeing less spam in my inbox again. Which is, of course, good.

Not sure if the Bayesian filtering has started working again tho'. Need to check that over the weekend.

(This is me using what limited Googlejuice this site has to get personal revenge)

Last June I bought a t-shirt from SIDStore. It was a nice t-shirt. It had a dalek on it. Here's a picture of me wearing the t-shirt. I was happy with my purchase. All was well with the world.

Of course, as I bought the t-shirt over the internet, I gave my email address to the vendor. This was (I assumed) purely so they could sent me email relating to the purchase of the shirt. At no point did I sign up for them to start sending me marketing email. I never sign up for marketing email and always make sure I've unchecked that checkbox on any web form I fill in.

Everything continued being well with the world until early this year. At that point I got an email from SIDStore trying to convince me to visit their site and buy more t-shirts. I deleted it. And then a couple of weeks later I got another one. This time I replied to the email. I asked why they had taken it upon themselves to start sending me these emails and told them that I didn't want to get any more. I got no reply other than another similar marketing email a couple of weeks later. I replied again asking once more to be removed from their mailing list. I should point out that none of their messages contain any details on how you might unsubscribe from their mailing list thereby breaking one of the basic rules for bulk email.

Of course, my second email was ignored too. And this morning I got another marketing email from them. So I'm going to assume that my email to them is being ignored for some reason and am forced to take alternative action. Stage one is this post. I'm hoping that this will get on the first page of a Google search for "SIDStore" and people will see that SIDStore use dubious onlne marketing tactics - sending marketing email to people who haven't requested it and not removing people from their mailing list when asked to.

SIDStore make nice shirts. I was very happy with the one I bought from them. But I won't buy from people who send unsolicited commercial email. So I won't be buying anything else from them until they remove me from their mailing list and explain why I was put on their list and why my previous requests to be removed have been ignored.

I strongly suggest that you do the same.

To summarise: SIDStore are spammers. Don't deal with them.

Update: Success. Currently this is the fourth second hit for a search on sidstore. I ♥ Google.

Here's a good example of how not to run a bulk email list.

Some time ago I registered with the Financial Times web site. At that time I must have given them my email address. But I'm certain that I wouldn't have ticked any boxes marked "send me email". I never tick those boxes and I always untick them if the come pre-ticked.

So I was surprised to get email from the FT yesterday. It wasn't even an important email. Just some kind of regular newletter. I'm pretty sure I'd never seen one before. But the FT are a responsible organisation so I gave them the benefit of the doubt. I followed the instructions at the bottom of the email explaining how to get off the mailing list. This involved sending an email to the FT.

Then it all started to go wrong.

First I got an email in reply confirming that my request had been received. It said this:

Your request to not receive promotional emails about your subscription has been received and will be processed within the next 10 working days.

Ten working days. Two weeks! It takes them two weeks to remove an email address from a mailing list. That's ridiculous. Anyone would think they didn't have any computers to do the work for them. There is no good reason why a request to be removed from a mailing list shouldn't be honoured immediately. Anyone who tells you otherwise is using software that should have been retired years ago.

And then to add insult to injury I got another copy of the original email a few minutes later.

I'm forced to reach the conclusion that the bulk mailing part of the FT's IT group is run by idiots. Or maybe they outsource it to idiots. The mail comes from interelate.net. I wonder if they are a (rubbish) bulk mail company.

Recently I've been getting more and more annoyed with people who don't know the difference between the "reply" and "reply all" buttons in their email programs. You get an email from a friend that goes to a group of people. Perhaps it's about arranging to meet up for a drink. You hit "reply all" and suggest some potential dates in an email that goes to everyone who recieved the original message. But then someone replies to your message pointing out which of those dates they can't make and they only send it to you because they hit "reply" instead of "reply all". At the same time other people are replying to the original message but only sending their reply to the original sender. The conversation becomes fragmented and no-one has a complete picture of what's going on.

It's much easier to just stay in and watch the television.

Your email program has two ways to reply to a message. Please learn the usefulness of "reply all".

People seemed interested in my recent post about basic password handling so I thought I'd write another similar post. This time we'll look at another example of basic customer interaction that so many people get wrong - sending bulk email.

Note that I'm not a lawyer, so this doesn't cover any of the legal stuff about getting people's permission to contact them or registering with the Data Protection Register because you're storing people's personal details. This is about purely technical issues that should be simple to get right.

As always, I'm interested in any comments you might have.

Rule 1: Send text versions

I'm going to get drummed out of the geek club for saying this, but I'm not going to tell you not to send HTML email. I don't like HTML email. I don't read HTML email that doesn't have a plain text version attached. But I know a lost cause when I see one. Companies are never going to stop sending HTML email and I'm not going to waste my breath explaining why they should.

I am, however, going to recommend that you don't send pure HTML email. You should always send a plain text version of the email alongside the HTML version. A very small percentage of the people you are emailing deliberately won't read HTML email. But a larger proportion will occasionally want to read your message using a device (maybe a mobile phone) that doesn't support HTML email. You'll be making their life easier by sending both versions.

And notice that you need to send both versions every time. Asking customers whether they want to recieve messages in HTML or plain text is just stupid. It makes your life harder and it doesn't help your customer who has asked for HTML email but needs to access your mail on a device that doesn't support it.

Obviously, the best approach would be for the text version to contain the same content as the HTML version. But perhaps you have good reasons why you only want people to see your message in the full colour HTML version. In that case you should still attach a text version. It should contain information on who you are, how the customer can unsubscribe from your mailing list and, if at all possible, a link to a copy of the email on your web site. It certainly shouldn't contain a rude order to "upgrade your email program" or the pointless information that "you can't read the content of this message". Just last week I got an email from a large online shop where the text attachment consisted of the words "text content". Content like this just makes you look unprofessional.

Rule 2: Say who you are sending it to

I have a number of email addresses that I use for different purposes. I'm sure I'm not unique in that respect. So when I get bulk email it's very helpful if the message tells me which email address it was sent to. This is particularly useful if I want to unsubscribe from your mailing list and your unsubscribe page prompts me for the address that I want to unsubscribe.

Also, by including the email and real name (if you have it) of the person you are contacting, your email is less likely to look like a phishing attack. This is the approach taken by companies like Ebay.

Rule 3: Send it from a real address

It's incredibly rude to send an email from an email address that won't accept replies. Sure, I know that you don't want to expose email addresses to potential spammers. But these are your (potential) customers. You need to trust them. And anyway you should have good spam protection installed.

There are two good ideas for addresses to send bulk email from. The first is to have it come from an unsubscribe address. That way, someone can unsubscribe from your mailing list simply by replying to the email. The second is to have it come from a customer service address where replies will be read by a real person who can deal with any queries that the recipients of the mail might have. It's probably not a good idea to have it coming from a real person's address as that can make it look a bit like spam.

Either of these are a good idea, but it's important to make it clear which one you are using. You don't want customers' queries going to an unsubscribe address!

Rule 4: Make it easy to unsubscribe

Much as you might hate it, occasionally people will want to unsubscribe from your mailing list. And you should make that as easy as possible. You should always either send the email from an unsubscribe address (see above) or put clear unsubscribe instructions in the email (and in the text version).

And you should respect unsubscribe requests immediately. I still get email which confirms I've been unsubscribed from a mailing list but adds that it might still be mail for the next few days. That is unacceptable. If your software doesn't honour unsubscription requests immediately, then you need to upgrade your software.

Four simple rules that should be well within the technical capabilities of any bulk email application. If yours doesn't follow all of these rules then you should consider changing to one that does. If you don't then you run the risk of needlessly annoying your customers and potential customers.

(Thanks to Chris Heathcote for some suggestions)

Update: Here's a good example of how not to do it. I recently ordered something from HMV's web site. The products went missing in the post and I've been in touch with them to get either a replacement or a refund. Every single email I've got from them - the order confirmation, the shipping confirmation and the messages from their customer support department - had a text portion that consisted of the text "textContent". None of the messages needed to be in HTML. Having them in HTML added nothing to the content. They all just contained text. Not even a logo. I can only assume that whoever set up HMV's customer support email system was a complete idiot.

I'm going back to shopping at Amazon.

I just noticed that the number of Gmail invitations that I've got to give away has doubled to 100. If you want an invitation and I know who you are, then just send me an email and I'll fire one off to you.