"Spam is Lame" of the "I Kill Spammers" blog has posted a pretty comprehensive and delightful recap of legal action taken against spammers in 2011 . I'm glad I stumbled across this as I hadn't known about the arrest of Alan Ralsky's stock broker …
Jay writes: Al, I am getting the following message on several email related to AT&T: flph260 DNSBL:ATTRBL 521< xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx>_is_blocked.__For_information_see_http://att.net/blocks After going the ATT site, using Spamhaus to check the IP as well as using AT&T…
I've written about Netprospex before. For example, talking about how I think their "opt-out" guidance on email marketing is misguided (and how so many others feel the same way). And then there was Peter Seebach's post questioning their touted "verified!…
I'm very sad to pass along the news that J.D. Falk has passed away after a year-long battle with cancer . I feel like I've known J.D. forever, and I most definitely had come to greatly respect and admire him. Occasionally someone would ask me if I'm trying to soun…
Today I stumbled across SBL listing SBL120550 , which says the following: "Several IPs in this /28 are sending spam to spamtraps advertising the services of ADT Home Security. The IPs belong to InfoCanada, a division of InfoUSA, via their Yesmail ESP. InfoUSA also sel…
eWeek reports that Dutch internet service provider A2B has filed two police complaints against anti-spam blacklist Spamhaus for refusing to terminate a provider Spamhaus alleges is known for "hosting malware, phishing and websites selling fraudulent goods advertised via sp…
A couple of years ago I posted here how my wife and I started getting oddly addressed email from a supposedly legitimate company, addressed to an address we never use, addressed to a person we don't know. Why? How? Email append .
As widely reported, MAAWG, the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group put out a statement a couple of weeks ago basically condemning email append. Find a link to the statement here , or click here to read Laura Atkins' coverage of the announcement. MAAWG is a broad ISP, email…
Nothing really wrong with the guidance in this blog post over at the Bronto Blog , but I can't be the only person who read the head line and thought, hey, I'm a person, not a lost shopping cart. Don't "push" me. Invite me. Am I right? (No, I'm not chan…
Well, maybe it wasn't quite a sure thing, because you never know how a judge is going to rule. You just don't. Even if the law seems clear as the blue sky (and this one does). But, good news -- as most folks expected, Holomaxx got spanked again in court today, the judge…
Over on the Word to the Wise blog, Steve Atkins reports on something very alarming : That Trend Micro's MAPS blocking lists seem to be playing silly buggers with spamtraps. Specifically, that while their stated requirements for list management best practices has always mand…
Well, I knew this was going to happen eventually: Google now has global spam filtering for Google Voice . It works in a way very similar to how ISPs track the sending reputation of email senders based on feedback from their users (i.e. spam reports). Now, if you opt-in to Googl…
The email authentication protocol DomainKeys Identified Mail, aka DKIM, is winding its way through the standards track, and seems to be the future of email authentication. Recently, a lone voice, a security researcher with Trend Micro, seemingly upset at being sidelined durin…
SpamTips.org, a website devoted to SpamAssassin Tips ( SpamAssassin being the wildly popular open-source spam filter) recently posted a wonderful DNSBL Safety Report , showing hit rates against both spam and non-spam (false positives) for various blacklists commonly used in Spa…
Gee, ya think THIS will scale? Over on the AOL Postmaster blog , a commenter tells a tale of his alternate method of finding a human at AOL to assist with his spam blocking issue: "Since I felt that this was beginning to rise to the level of something that AOL execs shoul…
I was asked today if Spamcop should be "trusted." After all, even the Spamcop Wikipedia page says that their blocking list is "controversial." Though, is it truly more controversial than any other blacklist out there? Let me tell you what I know. The last …
I received an email the other day that went something like this: "Hello, A media site you recently visited would like you to participate in their user-survey. Your input will be combined with other users' across the country to improve their site. To encourage your part…
Who are you? Wait -- now I remember you. Long ago, I was visiting some far away city, biding my time in some mall or airport or something, some place where the only option for wi-fi was via your company, so I paid you for a day's worth of Internet access or whatever. Now, t…
How come my list of third-party opt-ins from two years ago is now having problems, the question goes. What changed? I'm still doing everything right. I'm getting that question a lot lately, and a colleague suggested that I post my answer here, to share it with readers.…
The Composite Blocking List, a very popular anti-spam blacklist, reports that the Rustock botnet seems to have been disabled . Spam levels have plummeted as a result. Likely not forever, but it's still nice to see the bad guys struggling. Security journalist Brian Krebs cov…
But my email fully complies with CAN-SPAM, the argument goes. How can ISPs be allowed to block my mail? I comply! Here's how. Read section 8C of the CAN-SPAM law . It says: NO EFFECT ON POLICIES OF PROVIDERS OF INTERNET ACCESS SERVICE-- Nothing in this Act shall be cons…
Guest post by Neil Schwartzman . Reposted from the Word to the Wise blog with the permission of the author and publisher. Josh Baer, former VP of Datran Media and current CEO of OtherInBox.com has been floating an idea at the DMA’s Email Experience Council and a few other…
On March 5th, Spamhaus announced a change to its DBL (Domain Block List). They're now breaking out a separate category of listings specific to spamvertized URL redirectors that appear in spam. Meaning, if URL redirectors like bit.ly show up in a lot of spam, they're li…
Return Path's J.D. Falk reports on Comcast's efforts to let customers know when their home computers are infected: Pushing infectees into walled garden, redirecting them to a page warning them that their network connection is infected. J.D. Writes: "As one of the w…
Techworld reports: "Once the largest source of the world's spam, China has been gradually fading off the list of the world's top spam-producers. Right now Cisco Systems' IronPort group ranks it at number 18 in terms of spam-producing countries. That's a big…
A few days ago, a Slashdot user asked , “ Is there a war on small mail servers? ” The admin went on to state that he or she works for a company hosting their own mail server. Their two ISPs (Comcast and Verizon) both block port 25 outbound, and they’re complaining of getting ca…
Box of Meat tipped us to this wonderful post detailing the best practices to keep in mind when creating one or more spam trap addresses or domains. Spam fighters: this is a must read!
Hey, this is cool: According to Engadget , Cloudmark seems to be working on the next frontier of spam filtering: SMS spam. Give it a few years, and something like this will be baked into every provider's infrastructure or handsets. Can't wait. On an unrelated note, I ne…
Do you know Romer? He's just this guy, you know. As he points out over on his WordPress blog , he's been in the anti-spam field for the last decade, doing a little bit of everything. Most lately, he's an engineer for a major anti-spam product. I just noticed a very…
There's somebody sneaky in my Gmail spam folder. Some company I've never heard of, apparently called RESMAIL, keeps showing up there, once or twice a week. The footer always says "RESMAIL - 63 Madison Ave 9th Floor - New York, NY 10016 US." The source IP addre…
Laura Atkins reports on this over on the Word to the Wise blog , and Dennis Dayman covers this for Deliverability.com: Goodmail services are to be wound down on February 8th, 2011. I don't have much to add beyond what they've already said, but I do have a question: Kno…
What permission is: Permission means your potential subscriber initiated the request to sign up for your emails. What permission is not: I got a list of email addresses and I sent everybody a double opt-in request. Don't take my word for it -- ask Spamhaus . "You…
A spammer was kind enough to leave me a voicemail message today. I wanted to share it with you, so you could understand the delightful insight I receive from listening to differing viewpoints. Alas, I'm traveling for work, so I didn't really have a lot of time to respon…
I was talking to a guy the other day about the whole LinkedIn harvesting incident (or non-incident, depending upon your point of view), and this guy offered up that he had previously been in a somewhat similar situation before -- but on the other side of it. I offered up the o…
Over on Deliverability.com, Dennis Dayman shares a tale of spam and information about an uncooperative seller of email list data . Anybody else heard of this DeepWWW? Never heard of them before, myself.
I guess I’ve still got LinkedIn on the brain . In response to my complaint about being spammed by somebody due to harvesting of my email address from LinkedIn, the individual in question decided to aim a scattershot blob of tweets consisting of a whole bunch of old "B2B so…
I'm LOL'ing over here after reading Laura Atkins' Holomaxx v. Yahoo update .
Wow! 500+ new subscribers! It seems an exciting and easy opportunity, doesn’t it? If you’re like me, you’ve got a big list of contacts that you’ve “linked up” with on social (business) networking site LinkedIn. So many email addresses! My suggestion, however, is to resist the u…
