Authentication and phishing

Yahoo announced today that they are releasing the Yahoo! Mail Anti-Phishing Platform (YMAP) that will help protect their users from phishing. They have a similar project in place for eBay and PayPal mail, but this will extend to a broader range of companies.

[W]e’re beefing up Yahoo! Mail’s SpamGuard by adding more security measures that make it much harder for phishers to get to your mailbox. We’ve teamed up with email authentication partners—namely, Authentication Metrics, eCert, Return Path, and Truedomain—to gain significant coverage to protect the prime targets of phishing attacks.

Phishing is a huge problem. I have an unprotected mailbox and get tens of dozens of phishing emails a day. But until there was a way to validate the sender of an email, rather than just the source IP, there wasn’t a good way to say that a particular email didn’t count.
SPF was one of the first attempts to solve this problem, but it didn’t do it very well. There were a number of very common uses of email that SPF didn’t accommodate.

Despite what the SPF crowd desperately wants to belive, there’s no simple way to tell what mail can legitimately be sent from what IPs. In some cases you can get pretty close, e.g., ESP spam cannon stuff, but even there plenty of people forward other accounts to gmail, which SPF doesn’t handle. — John Levine

Then there came Domain Keys and Identified Mail. Those two specs were close enough to one another that they merged into a single spec, DKIM. For the last few years significant numbers of people have been working to get DKIM stabilized and deployed.  That adoption and deployment lets companies build out products like YAMP and protect users from phishing.

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Email marketing ulcers for the holiday

I’ve mentioned here before that I can usually tell when the big ISPs are making changes to their spam filtering as that ISP dominates my discussions with current and potential clients and many discussions on delivery mailing lists.
The last two weeks the culprit has been Yahoo. They seem to be making a lot of changes to their filtering schemes right at the busiest email marketing time of the year. Senders are increasing their volume trying to extract that last little bit of cash out of holiday shoppers, but they’re seeing unpredictable delivery results. What worked to get mail into the inbox a month ago isn’t working, or isn’t working as well, now.
Some of this could be holiday volume related. Many marketers have drastically increased their mail volume over the last few weeks. But I don’t think the whole issue is simply that there is more email marketing flowing into our mailboxes.
As I’ve been talking with folks, I have started to see a pattern and have some ideas of what may be happening. It seems a lot of the issue revolves around bulk foldering. Getting mail accepted by the MXs seems to be no different than it has been. The change seems to be based on the reputation of the URLs and domains in the email.
Have a domain with a poor reputation? Bulk. Have a URL seen in mail people aren’t interested in? Bulk. Have a URL pointing to a website with problematic content? Bulk.
In the past IPs that were whitelisted or had very good reputations could improve delivery of email with neutral or even borderline poor reputations. It seems that is no longer an effect senders can rely on. It may even be that Yahoo, and other ISPs, are going to start splitting IP reputation from content reputation. IP reputation is critical for getting mail in the door, and without a good IP reputation you’ll see slow delivery. But once the mail has been accepted, there’s a whole other level of filtering, most of it on the content and generally unaffected by the IP reputation.
I don’t think the changes are going to go away any time soon. I think they may be refined, but I do think that reputation on email content (particularly domains and URLs and target IP addresses) is going to play a bigger and bigger role in email delivery.
What, specifically, is going to happen at Yahoo? Only they can tell you and I’m not sure I have enough of a feel for the pattern to speculate about the future. I do think that it’s going to take a few weeks for things to settle down and be consistent enough that we can start to poke the black box and map how it works.

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Holomaxx dismisses part of lawsuit

Ken announced yesterday that Holomaxx dropped their suits against Ironport and ReturnPath. Suits against Yahoo and Hotmail are still active.
In the Yahoo case, there is a case management meeting on January 14th.
In the Microsoft case, a response the complaint is due by December 17th.
I’m not quite sure what happened to prompt this change, but I think it makes it even more unlikely that the case will be successful. The courts have repeatedly ruled in favor of ISPs in these kinds of cases.
EDIT: I’d link to Ken’s article, but I appear to have closed that tab and I can’t find it on his website. I’ll add it as soon as I do.
EDIT: Ken’s announcement

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Holomaxx v. MSFT and Yahoo

I mentioned way back in January that Yahoo had filed a motion to dismiss the case against Holomaxx. Microsoft filed a motion to dismiss around that time, although I didn’t mention it here.
And, of course, Holomaxx filed a motion in opposition in both the Microsoft case and the Yahoo case. Nothing terribly interesting here, about what you’d expect to read.
On March 11 the judge ruled on both motions to dismiss and in both cases ruled that the case was dismissed.  He did, however, give leave for the complaints to be amended in the future.
As I expected the Judge agreed that MSFT and Yahoo have protection under the CDA. First, the court made it clear that providers are allowed wide leeway in determining what is objectionable to their customers.

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