Evil Spammers: The Yale Economic Review?

For 2 days now (right in the middle of a sale, no less!) Denise and I have been perplexed by bounced emails. (Perplexed being a euphemism for pissed off...)

It turns out our email signatures contained links to our new Law of Action program and to our Blog Squad video. Both of these are hosted on a Hostgator server. The same server hosts a site that has been reported as a spammer.

I did my research: the nasty offender is none other than The Yale Economic Review! Spam blockage usually happens when someone - a disgruntled recipient - reports an incident as spam. That's all it takes.

Unfortunately, the spammers continue to mess us all up. I  doubt that a serious magazine such as The Yale Economic Review employs spammers or spamming techniques.

In the meantime, SpamHaus takes reports seriously and all of the sites hosted on the same server as The Yale Economic Review will have problems: emails that bounce and reported as blocked because of spam content.

We've often said and tell our clients that to make money on the Web you've got to have an impeccable sales process. Anything that interferes with smooth communications can destroy your credibility and trust with buyers.

And then this happens to us! It's clearly not us that has been reported for spam. But how to let prospects know when they reply to your email and get a bounce message saying it is blocked because of possible spam content???

And it's clearly not our hosting service's fault either. As for The Yale Economic Review...there's some sort of problem there, but are they really spamming? Or was this some recipient who perceived them as spamming and decided to do some damage?

The person who reported the spamming offense has no idea, of course, that the complaint has repercussions for other non-offending businesses such as ours and countless others.

There's a problem when a complaint has so many consequences, so much collateral damage to innocent businesses.

Yet, who among us is doing anything about this problem? The system is not working to block spammers and it's doing damage to reputable businesses.

Your comments? Experiences with this type of problem? Hit the comment link and share...

***P.S. You'll notice there are few links in this post. This is because if you get this update through an email service, we don't want it to be blocked!!!

Comments

[Bob Sherman Internet Marketing Pro]

As spam blockers become more sophisticated they can target spammers more precisely. But, now it's a lot easier to block entire IP addresses or even IP ranges.

Probably the thing that will get the attention of the blockers will be a law suite from an innocent party that will win a large settlement.

The ease of blocing everyone on an IP range can only be made less "easy" when legal action by innocents makes that convenience very costly.

[Denise aka The Blog Squad]

Another issue here is the cost of a dedicated server vs. a shared server. Or $179/mo vs. $10/mo. That's a huge cost to have to bear when you're an independent service professional, yet it would solve the problem until someone reported the dedicated server IP...

[Denise aka The Blog Squad]

To follow up on this issue, in less than 12 hours our sites were cleared with Spamhaus. The offending site was removed and the IP address cleared and taken off the blacklist. Whew.

[Shama Hyder]

So sorry to hear about your dilema. Something similar happened with us a month ago. We learned that our contact us page was down for a month. Luckily, people were very understanding.