Читать книгу Digital Etiquette For Dummies - Eric Butow - Страница 56

If your industry has any specific email-sending regulations, contact the industry groups you’re affiliated with to find out whether they have any guidelines. Hopefully, they post any information on their website, but if not, a quick email or phone call may identify issues you need to be aware of.

In addition to checking online communication rules in your industry, you should look at organizations dedicated to fighting villains such as malware, spam, and viruses and to creating better online communication. The Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group is one such organization, but because that’s a mouthful, the group also goes by the abbreviation M³AAWG, which is only slightly easier to remember, let alone say. Fortunately, after you type www.m3aawg.org (see Figure 2-4) into the address bar, you can bookmark the page and forget the URL.

You know that the M³AAWG is a serious effort when you look at its list of sponsors, which includes Adobe, AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Microsoft. And the list of full members is equally impressive: It includes Apple, Cisco Systems, IBM, and Twitter.

The site includes a list of best practices as well as other tips for sending proper messages, and you don’t even have to sign up to be a member — they’re free to view directly from the M³AAWG website.

FIGURE 2-4: The M³AAWG website includes links to best practices.

If you suspect that your email messages are being blocked by the intended recipient or you can’t receive email from a specific person, a good place to find out whether that's the case is the Spamhaus Project website at www.spamhaus.org (see Figure 2-5).

The Spamhaus Project is a global organization based in Andorra, a small European country that’s easy to forget (and we won’t judge you). It’s tucked away in the Pyrenees Mountains on the French/Spanish border. The word spamhaus is a made-up German expression, coined by founder Steve Linford to refer to an Internet service provider that spams or provides services to spammers.

Like M³AAWG, The Spamhaus Project has a lot of big sponsors, including Amazon Web Services, 1&1, and Rackspace. It provides a lot of free services, including the ability for you to see whether a domain name or even a specific IP address is on one of its blocklists. If you continue to receive spam, you can also see whether the sender is on the Spamhaus Project Register of Known Spam Operators database.

FIGURE 2-5: The Spamhaus Project website has links to various online resources to help you identify spammers.

The Spamhaus Project also has some interesting infobits about spam, including the fact that 80 percent of spam can be traced to 100 known spam operators in the Register of Known Spam Operators.