ArchiveJanuary 2014

Update on Herman Cain advertising male enhancement drugs

Shawn Studer from newsmax.com contacted me today with a statement about the Herman Cain mailing list. Newsmax Media represents Herman Cain’s email list. This list was not created from his presidential campaign, but from other activities online where respondents doubled opted-in to receive information from Mr. Cain on his views and activities. At no time are email addresses from the Cain...

Does email have a guarantee of delivery?

A client asked me earlier this week what SLAs ISPs provided for email delivery. The short answer is that there isn’t a SLA and that the only guarantee is that the email will get there when it gets there. But as I was mentioning this to Steve, he pointed out that there was a recent change in the RFCs for email. In both RFC 821/2 and RFC 2821/2 (the original email related RFCs and the update...

Repurposing addresses

Multiple news sources are reporting that Herman Cain, republican presidential hopeful from 2012. Maddow on Herman Cain’s new business model. Apparently, his email address list is for rent by just about anyone, including companies selling cures for erectile dysfunction. The erectile-dysfunction ad is one of more than 50 similar pitches for miracle cures and easy-money tricks that Cain has...

Where did you get my address?

Both Steve and I are trying to get answers from Amazon, Target and Epsilon about how Target acquired our Amazon specific email addresses. Target phone reps told us the mail we got was a phish, Epsilon is refusing to acknowledge Target is a customer and Amazon has promised us “they’re looking into it.” Meanwhile, an address of mine was transferred from one customer of an ESP to...

Spamhaus on ESPs

Promoted from yesterday’s comments, Spamhaus comments on my discussion of filtering companies getting tired of ESPs. You hit the nail square on, Laura. As Laura knows but many here might not, I am with the Spamhaus project. At one time I was leading efforts to clean up ESP spam. I am not deeply involved with ESP listings any longer. I can however testify that ESPs ask Spamhaus volunteers...

Abuse it and lose it

Last week I blogged about the changes at ISPs that make “ISP Relations” harder for many senders. But it’s not just ISPs that are making it a little more difficult to get answers to questions, some spam filtering companies are pulling back on offering support to senders. For instance, Cloudmark sent out an email to some ESPs late last week informing them that Cloudmark was...

CNN warns about Target copy-cat phishes

Target did indeed do a blast to customers to offer one year of free credit monitoring. The problem is scammers are also on the prowl and are sending out similar emails. Target even says it has identified and stopped at least 12 scams preying on consumers via email, Facebook and other outlets.CNN: Did you get an email from Target? I’m not surprised in the least that phishers are copy-catting...

Target "acquires data"

It was our priority to inform as many guests as quickly as possible. Relevant emails were pulled from a variety of sources. @AskTarget It looks like Target is mailing data that was never given to them in an effort to “inform” customers of the data breach. There are lots of problems with how Target is managing this email campaign. The first is in delivery. They’re hitting...

Target, Epsilon, Spam

If you enter “bfi0” into the Google search box, it’s suggestions are:

bfi0 target
bfi0 com whois
bfi0 spam
target.bfi0.com spam

That says a lot about how people are perceiving the mail Target are sending through Epsilon.

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