So, yesterday I put out a list of the bottom 10 posts of 2009. I promised then that I’d put out a list of the top 10 posts today, and here they are (in reverse order — #1 is really #10).

1. IP relisted despite no more mail being sent. It seems like I blogged about Barracuda a lot. Truth be told, I probably had more problems out of Barracuda in 2009 than I did anyone else. This post was about them relisting an IP address even though they could not have had any fresh complaints since there had been no mail going out over it in more than 30 days.
2. When is transactional mail not transactional anymore? This post was over what changes the nature of a mailing. In this case, it was a date on a membership card. Mail sent before the expiration date is transactional, but mail sent after is commercial marketing.
3. Barry Speaks: We won’t shut-up and eat your spam. This is one of those anonymous blog posts by the well-known “Barry”. In it, Barry explains that ISP’s don’t really care about senders’ pain so much as they care about senders sending mail that the ISP’s customers actually want to get.
4. Yahoo! running (some of) Verizon’s Email Services. Talk about old news making the news again. In the course of investigating a blocking issue for my employer, I discovered that the mail server for the Verizon customer we were mailing was flowing through Yahoo’s service. The rest, as they say, is history.
5. Breaking: SORBS bought by GFI (with confirmation!)After reading on another blog that the SORBS DNSBL had been bought by GFI, I reached out for confirmation….and got it.
6. SORBS Closure Imminent. This was a post about the announcement by Michelle Sullivan that the SORBS DNSBL was in danger of closing.
7. The hard truth about email. This post, which comes in forth on the top 10 list for page views comes in first for the number of comments (and we love comments!). It’s a reminder for senders that the ISPs’ resources are limited and tend to get overloaded during the holiday season.
8. Use Private Domain Registration and Go to Jail?. This post was a commentary on USA v. Kilbride, (9th Cir., 2009), which featured a section which, if I read it correctly, indicates that use of Domain Privacy services by marketers may well violate the CAN-SPAM Act.
9. Barracuda & EmailReg.org: Pay-to-play or just joined at the hip? This post was just plain fun to do. There’s some sort of agreement between Barracuda Networks and the EmailReg.org people, but no one outside of those two groups knows what it is. But that duck sure is loud.
10. A CAN-SPAM Checklist. This post had about 100 more page views than the runner-up. It’s a list of things that marketers need to make sure they’re doing to stay on the right side of the law.

And there you have it until next year.

Happy New Year, everyone!