Good morning, Greg, I've CC'd the surbl mailing list with this post because I'd like to hear the opinions of the other member of the surbl team.
On Thu, 18 May 2006, Greg Schuler wrote:
Greetings,
As the IT director for Aptimus I have for some time known that our domain has been blacklisted. This is because Aptimus was formerly in the email marketing business and we did not have a 100% closed-loop opt-in process.
During that time I received a relatively steady supply of UBE to a small number of spamtraps, so I'm hesitant to remove your domain without some discussion.
We left the email business last year and for all of 2006 we have sent email only to those end users who have "transacted" on our partner web
We appreciate your taking a positive step and contacting us after that; that's one of the reasons why I'm seriously considering your request.
sites. We do not add these email addresses to any mailing lists and we never send a user more than one message (e.g. these are confirmation messages sent to acknowledge a legitimate web-based transaction such as purchasing a product, entering a contest, signing up for a newsletter or service or some similar activity). Unfortunately it seems even sending a confirmation message is considered "Spam" by some people and we still get a few complaints, but never more than a couple per month.
Confirmation messages with no other commercial content are not considered spam in our project, so you're OK there.
Based on the above, would it be possible to have aptimus.com and aptimus.net removed from your list? If not, could you explain why? If there's something else we need to do to get our domains cleaned up I'd really like to know.
The last aptimus.net mail I got was from January 15th, so that tends to support what you said. I have a few questions. If you've assembled a live customer list with UBE for a few years, then stop sending UBE, doesn't that mean you get the benefits of that UBE even after you stop sending it? Secondly, I went back to the mail I've gotten from aptimus .net/com for the past few years to look at the "partner" domains (domains also linked to in mails that point at aptimus .net/com. A number of them continue to send UBE, which makes me wonder if perhaps you've stopped using your own domain name in the mails but continue to send UBE (that's not an accusation, it literally is a question). Would you be willing to help me understand your relationships with the following domains? The following are the ones that I've seen in 2006:
Jan 8 03:17 tr1usc .com Jan 15 16:22 consumertoday .net Jan 15 16:22 aptimus .com Jan 15 16:22 alnimglrhyd .cc Jan 20 02:45 alnimglrbsh .cc Jan 20 02:45 alnclklrbsh .com Jan 20 02:45 mediamarketsystem .com Jan 21 22:55 collectiblestoday .com Jan 27 01:31 removeservice .com Feb 4 04:34 thrifthealth .com Mar 11 02:29 alnclklrhyd .com Mar 11 02:30 eforcemedia .com Mar 11 02:32 laih .com Mar 12 15:00 emarketmakers .com Mar 12 22:44 dentalplans .com Mar 12 22:44 intriguelearning .com Apr 16 02:09 dnelist .com Apr 16 02:09 esideliver .com
Thanks and regards,
Greg Schuler Director, Technology & Operations Aptimus, Inc. (NASDAQ: APTM) The Point-of-Action Online Advertising Network
100 Spear Street, Suite 1115 San Francisco, CA 94105 Ph: 415-896-2123 x242 Fax: 208-361-2452 Mobile: 415-596-6127 gregs@aptimus.com
Cheers, - Bill
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- "My fellow Americans. I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." - President Reagan, before a scheduled radio broadcast, unaware that the microphone was already on... (Courtesy of Brian S. Dellinger Brian.Dellinger@Dartmouth.EDU) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- William Stearns (wstearns@pobox.com). Mason, Buildkernel, freedups, p0f, rsync-backup, ssh-keyinstall, dns-check, more at: http://www.stearns.org --------------------------------------------------------------------------