This month in email: February 2014

After a few months of hiatus, I’m resurrecting the this month in email feature. So what did we talk about in February?
Industry News
There was quite a bit of industry news. M³AAWG was in mid-February and there were actually a few sessions we were allowed to blog about. Gmail announced their new pilot FBL program. Ladar Levinson gave the keynote talking about the Lavabit shutdown and his new darkmail program. Brian Krebs won the Mary Litynski award for his work in investigating online security issues. The 4 major mailbox providers talked about their spam filters and spam filtering philosophy.
February was also the month where different companies evaluated their success or failure of products. LinkedIn announced the shutdown of their Intro product and Facebook announced the shutdown of their Facebook.com email service.
Security Issues
Cloudmark published their 2013 report on the Global Spam Threat and we discovered that the massive Target breach started through phishing. I also noticed a serious uptick in the amount of phishing mails in my own mailbox. There is  new round of denial of service attacks using NTP amplification. We provided information on how to secure your NTP servers.
Address Collection
The Hip Hop group De La Soul released their entire catalog for free, online, using a confirmed opt-in email process. On the flip side, the M³AAWG hotel required anyone logging into the wifi network to give an email address and agree to receive marketing mail. We also discovered that some political mailing lists were being used in ways the politicians and recipients didn’t expect.
Email Practices
I talked about how to go about contacting an ISP that doesn’t have a postmaster page or a published method of contact. Much of that information is actually relevant for contacting ISPs that do have a contact method, too. Finally, I talked about how ISPs measure engagement and how that’s significantly different from how ESPs think it is.