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June 30, 2009

Not all URL shorteners are created equal when it comes to handling abuse complaints. Yesterday's flood continues. I went back to see how my abuse reports faired. Of the services I contacted, the only one that seems truly diligent about stomping out spam abuse of their service is is.gd. Four gold stars for them!

The one that looks to be the most problematic is kl.am, which appears to be run by a Tennessee "online marketing" firm called Sitening LLC. Unlike the responsive shorteners, kl.am does not have an abuse reporting link on their main page...or anywhere. Moreover, the main page is titled:

Shorten URL with URL Shortener for Internet Marketers

In other words, they seem to be encouraging the use of URL shorteners by commercial emailers. What a great way for a company to build an online brand presence—by hiding behind a URL shortener. WTF?

OTOH, it makes it easy for me to handle any company that takes advantage of this shortening service for spam purposes. From hereon, any email message body that contains a kl.am URL arriving from a non-whitelisted address goes straight to dev/null. See y'all!

(Tinyurl may be next.)