Hey! You can find the more modern, updated version of this question and answer here . Whoops @ the newsletter automation choosing this old article for inclusion in this a 2022 newsletter.
Michael Rathbun recently commented on my old 2007 post linking to his "Story of Nadine" website . He notes, "A while back I located an obituary notice for "Nadine". She still gets between 50 and 200 messages per day, all of which now feed the Spamcop se…
Open relays are back! Spamhaus shares the sad story that history is repeating itself and spammers are once again finding and exploiting open relaying mail servers to shovel spam at you. Fighting the open relay problem was a big part of my initial spam fighting efforts , back i…
Over at Word to the Wise, Laura Atkins reports on Scott Richter's domain registrar Dynamic Dolphin getting its accreditation yanked. I'm not sure why this took so long. This was one of those open secret kind of things that everybody talked about in the hallways at just…
Andrej writes, "Hello, I would like to ask you to remove my IP address from APEWS.org blocklist. Thank you very much." Andrej, thanks for reaching out. I wish I could offer you my assistance. But I cannot help you. Every once in a while, somebody will email me thinkin…
(Hat tip to: Laura Atkins of WttW ) This is almost timely -- I was teed up to speak at a recent email/anti-abuse conference on the topic of Payday Loan marketers and what a challenge they can be, but had to bow out at the last moment. Thankfully, my colleague Mickey Chandler …
Over at Spamtacular, Mickey Chandler explains how one single submission on one form resulted in his test account receiving hundreds of emails. This is a big part of why payday loan senders are such a deliverability nightmare; everybody seems to buy/sell/trade email addresses, …
Every once in a while, maybe every few days, I pull up my bookmark for the SBL Latest Additions and Removals over on spamhaus.org . It's usually pretty interesting to watch. It's basically the only public announcement that a new sender, ISP, ESP or ESP's client has …
Ars Technica reports: "Four plaintiffs filed a class-action suit in US district court in San Jose on Friday claiming that LinkedIn used its member's identities without consent and broke into their third party e-mail accounts to send promotional e-mails to the members&#…
Here's my take on it, and here's John Levine's take . I really like John's breakdown of the clickwrap license issue and detail on how the parties included email addresses in filings, leaving it to the judge to point out that this was totally unnecessary.
Do you know what a mail merge variable is? I used the term the other day in an email to a coworker and they were confused. An email list attribute? A personalization string? What do you call those? What does your email platform call those? You know, the bit where you put in DEA…
Do you have any other links to articles about Gmail's new tabbed inbox user interface? Leave details in a comment and I'll update the post. Let's start with two from Ken Magill: His August 20th article talking to Kirk Gray of APUS, and his August 27th article expl…
From his August 20th article talking to Kirk Gray of APUS: "The more I read about Gmail tabs, the more I think a bunch of folks are getting worked up over a whole lot of nothing." From his August 27th article quoting another author's extreme concerns: "You …
Over on CircleID, John Levine shares his thoughts on the default judgment in Zoobuh v. Better Broadcasting . Though it's a default judgment, the judge actually seems to have spent some time researching the law and didn't just blindly affirm everything the plaintiff pre…
Every couple of days, somebody new pops up on the DMARC-Discuss mailing list to ask some question or share an observation. It's great to see people interested and joining the conversation. Clearly, DMARC interest and adoption are growing. What's really frustrating, tho…
It's Twitter's turn to jump on the two factor bandwagon. I'm sad that it didn't happen sooner , but still happy to see them joining the ranks of Apple , Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Facebook . Please, please, please consider turning on two factor authentication…
I'm a big fan of two factor authentication. I've been using it on my Google accounts forever. Yahoo has it. Microsoft has it. Now, Apple has it, too! I'm very glad to hear this. I'll be setting it up for my account this weekend.
It's been a long time since I've noticed a new anti-spam blacklist (DNSBL) out in the wild. For more information, click on over to the DNSBL Chile article on DNSBL.com .
Brian Krebs reports on the arrest made in response to the recent massive distributed denial-of-service attack against anti-spam group Spamhaus. ( Hat tip: Laura Atkins )
Ken Magill posted today on " Why Fully Confirmed Opt-in Sucks ." It's definitely worth reading, and I hear where Ken's coming from. To "lose a subscriber" through their failure to confirm, that can really hurt when a list is pretty small. I should kn…
It looks like email permission is not the only challenge for some payday loan marketers. Case in point: This weekend I ran across this story on Slashdot explaining how a Wordpress plugin was hacked to include a link to a UK payday loan site .
In Laura Atkins' blog post where she shares her thoughts on COI , she links to this amazing article from the New Yorker, where Matthew J.X. Malady shares a bit of insight about the vast amounts of misdirected mail received at his own vanity Gmail account.
You've read one point of view somewhere else. Now go read this different, very well thought out take on the subject . It provides a very good overview of the considerations surrounding whether or not you would want to implement confirmed opt-in.
I'm very happy to hear that two-step (also call two-factor) authentication is coming to Microsoft, supposedly in the near future. Yahoo! and Google have had it for a while now, and I'm a big fan. Getting spam from a friend's hacked account is a common attack vect…
One of the UK's largest ISPs, Sky.com, has hired Yahoo! Mail to run their email infrastructure. For more information, surf on over to this page with current status and details. Sounds like it's not going so well for subscribers. What does this mean for senders? Smart …
Can't blame this on the date, as it was posted days ago. This publication would like you to know that "the attacks were focused on a company called Spamhaus, which maintains a "domain name system" to connect a typed-in URL to the correct server hosting the a…
Spamhaus sure seems to be in the news a lot lately. Or at least, I'm mentioning them on my blog an awful lot lately. The latest coverage concerns a rather large DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against Spamhaus, which effectively pushed bits of their infrastructu…
I'm married to a feminist. My wife, Kate Harding , knows athing or two about rape culture, bad guys and misogyny. (In fact, she's theauthor of "Asking For It" forthcoming from Da Capo Press in Fall 2013.) She has long shared with me stories about women being t…
Ken Magill tweeted this today: If anyone still wonders why Spamhaus keeps at arm's length, check out the comments on this bit.ly/10e7i3y — Ken Magill (@Kmagill) March 20, 2013 Meaning, if you're wondering why some of the Spamhaus people tend to use pseudonyms, why they …
It seems as though my website over at DNSBL.com has turned into a graveyard for dead DNSBLs. Over the past few years, I've observed more than a dozen blacklists go missing, and I've written about more than a dozen others who were shut down prior to that or weren't…
A number of months ago, Steve Linford of Spamhaus replied to columnist Ken Magill on the topic of why Spamhaus editors don't typically provide their names. I highly recommend reading it, then coming back to my post to get my thoughts on this. This occasionally comes up at …
Steve Atkins of Word to the Wise has posted a very interesting story , detailing a little bit of spam history from just over ten years ago. According to Steve, a gentleman who used to work for a spammer participated in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) question and answer session,…
Over on the ExactTarget blog, Carlo Catajan explains the recently discovered (and since closed) Yahoo! Mail account security issue.
