This past Friday, May 25th, was a very busy day in the email and privacy world. The EU’s Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect, prompting all sorts of privacy policy updates (which in turn prompted all sorts of emails about those updates). From my own experience and the shared experiences of many others, it seems most of these emails cast a very wide net – devoid of targeting or list hygiene. Many of us received updates from brands we don’t remember engaging – and others with which we never did. As a result of all this email, the German UCEProtect blacklist was also very busy, seeing a surge in IPs appearing on its blacklists (h/t Word to the Wise). We’ve seen a small surge in the number of client IPs on UCEProtect as well, but haven’t been able to correlate it directly to GDPR notices. As Laura notes, UCEProtect is not typically a list that causes many bounces, so seeing your IP(s) there is more of a nuisance in most cases.

In other blacklist-related news, it appears the Spamcannibal blacklist has shut down. The domain (don’t go there, really) now presents a number of nefarious redirects instead of the blacklist content. No official announcement has been provided, but the Spamcannibal list was considered among the less-reliable blacklists by many in the industry. If the shutdown is permanent, the impact is likely to be minor as the list was not widely used for inbound mail filtering.

– BG