AHBL (Abusive Host Blocking List) is a DNSBL (Domain Name Service Blacklist) that has been available since 2003 and is used by administrators to crowd-source spam sources, open proxies, and open relays. By collecting the data into a single list, an email system can check this blacklist to determine if a message should be accepted or rejected. AHBL is managed by The Summit Open Source Development...
It’s something many people don’t think about, but the majority of the traffic coming into the SMTP port is malicious. Spam is passively malicious, in that it just uses resources and bothers people. But there is a lot of actively malicious traffic coming into the SMTP port. Email is used as a vector to spread viruses and other malware. Email is also used for phishing and scamming. Many...
Earlier this week Bloomberg news reported that an anonymous source told them Verizon was looking to acquire or investigate a partnership with AOL. It didn’t take long for the Verizon CEO to quash the acquisition rumors. Acquisitions and partnerships have always been around in technology, this is nothing new. But it made me think a little bit about the acquisitions and mergers in the ESP...
Spam is still 80 – 90% of global email volume, depending on which study look at. Most of that spam doesn’t make it to the inbox; ISPs reject a lot of it during the SMTP transaction and put much of rest of it in the bulk folder. But as the volumes of spam have grown, ISPs and filters are relying more and more on automation. Gone are the days when a team of people could manually review...
Welcome to a whole new year. It seems the changing of the year brings out people predicting what they think will happen in the coming year. It’s something I’ve indulged in a couple times over my years of blogging, but email is a generally stable technology and it’s kind of boring to predict a new interface or a minor tweak to filters. Of course, many bloggers will go way out on...
2014 has been a busy and exciting year at Word to the Wise (look for more on that in a year-end wrap-up post next week!) and this month was particularly thrilling for us as we officially doubled our size with the addition of Josh and Meri on our client services team. If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you’ve probably spotted Josh’s byline on a few posts: Google’s Inbox Team answers questions...
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