Ideas for more Linode forums

@ferodynamics:

For example, I'd love to learn more about "IP warming"…

Here is an excellent link from Geophysical Research Letters that might help you in this:

http://www.agu.org/journals/ABS/2008/2008GL034345.shtml

From the scientific paper abstract:

"The extratropical large-scale atmospheric circulation is often described in terms of a few preferred and recurrent patterns referred to as weather regimes. Here, we investigate the influence of the observed Indian and western Pacific Ocean (IP) warming over the last decades, on the frequency of occurrence of North Atlantic weather regimes."

Should be exactly what you are looking for.

James

@zunzun:

Indian and western Pacific Ocean (IP) warming
LOL :D

For those of you not in the know, "IP warming" is used when a spammer switches to sending e-mails from a new IP address (or range of IP addresses).

If spam suddenly starts flooding in from a new IP address, that IP address is usually blocked very quickly. If instead the flood of spam begins as a trickle and slowly builds, spam from that IP address won't be blocked so quickly.

This is called "warming up the IP address", or "IP warming", among e-mail spammers.

James

Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.

I don't want any spam!

@pclissold:

I don't want any spam!

I don't understand how you could ever expect to enlarge any body parts, check the time, or stay doped up on prescription drugs without the fine products these people advertise.

James

The alternative to "IP warming" is you give up your entire user database to some delivery company (you can't say for sure you trust) and pay them a nice sum of money every month to get your emails through all kinds of secret blocking mechanisms.

Almost seems like money well spent because I heard you could set off a Google or Yahoo or Hotmail spam flag just using the wrong word in a sentence. But the average webmaster has no way of knowing what those words are without insider information.

On top of that you have all this "whitelisting" and such, really seems crazy to me how much time and effort is spent just to send an email.

Most sites say they will never share your email address, but most of them probably use some 3rd-party delivery service. How is that keeping the address private? Not that my VPS is absolutely private.

And take for example a service like Aweber. Maybe you sign up 1000 people but 5 percent of those people are missing somehow. What really happened? Does Aweber "skim" some emails without your knowledge? Who really knows for sure, because you outsourced to Aweber, a mysterious black box where anything could happen without your knowledge. Meanwhile you're paying them good money, feeding them more emails, while they keep you in the dark. Disclaimer, I've never used Aweber, I'm sure it's run by very honest people!

I was thinking about using SendGrid but if you look at the plans they have, with the basic accounts you're sharing an IP address with lots of other unknown sites. So really, I think you're better off sending the emails yourself, rather than rolling the dice with mysterious people you're sharing an IP with.

So because of years of spam, now you need a PhD to send out a basic newsletter.