Your system; your rules

In the late 90s I was reasonably active in the anti-spam community and in trying to protect mailboxes. There were a couple catchphrases that developed as a bit of shorthand for discussions. One of them was “my server, my rules.” The underlying idea was that someone owned the different systems on the internet, and as owners of those systems they had the right to make usage rules for them. These rules can be about what system users can do (AUPs and terms of service) or what about what other people can do (web surfers or email senders).
I think this is still a decent guiding principle in “my network, my rules”. I do believe that network owners can choose what traffic and behavior they will allow on their network. But these days it’s a little different than it was when my dialup was actually a PPP shell account and seeing a URL on a television ad was a major surprise.
But ISPs are not what they once were. They are publicly owned, global companies with billion dollar market caps. The internet isn’t just the playground of college students and researchers, just about anyone in the US can get online – even if they don’t own a computer there is public internet access in many areas. Some of us have access to the internet in our pockets.
They still own the systems. They still make the rules. But the rules have to balance different constituencies including users and stockholders. Budgets are bigger, but there’s still a limited amount of money to go around. Decisions have to be made. These decisions translate into what traffic the ISP allows on the network. Those decisions are implemented by the employees. Sometimes they screw up. Sometimes they overstep. Sometimes they do the wrong thing. Implementation is hard and one of the things I really push with my clients. Make sure processes do what you think they do.
A long way of dancing around the idea that individual people can make policy decisions we disagree with on their networks, and third parties have no say in them. But those policy decisions need to be made in accordance with internal policies and processes. People can’t just randomly block things without consequences if they violate policies or block things that shouldn’t be blocked.
Ironically, today one of the major telcos managed to accidentally splash their 8xx number database. 8xx numbers are out all over the country while they search for backups to restore the database. This is business critical for thousands of companies, and is probably costing companies money right and left. Accidents can result in bigger problems than malice.
 

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August 2015: The month in review

It’s been a busy blogging month and we’ve all written about challenges and best practices. I found myself advocating that any company that does email marketing really must have a well-defined delivery strategy. Email is such vital part of how most companies communicate with customers and potential customers, and the delivery landscape continues to increase in complexity (see my post on pattern matching for a more abstract look at how people tend to think about filters and getting to the inbox). Successful email marketers are proactive about delivery strategy and are able to respond quickly as issues arise. Stay tuned for more from us on this topic.
I also wrote up some deliverability advice for the DNC, which I think is valuable for anyone looking at how to maintain engagement with a list over time.  It’s also worth thinking about in the context of how to re-engage a list that may have been stagnant for a while. A comment on that post inspired a followup discussion about how delivery decisions get made, and whether an individual person in the process could impact something like an election through these delivery decisions. What do you think?
As we frequently point out, “best practices” in delivery evolve over time, and all too often, companies set up mail programs and never go back to check that things continue to run properly. We talked about how to check your tech, as well as what to monitor during and after a send. Josh wrote about utilizing all of your data across multiple mail streams, which is critical for understanding how you’re engaging with your recipients, as well as the importance of continuous testing to see what content and presentation strategies work best for those recipients.
Speaking of recipients, we wrote a bit about online identity and the implications of unverified email addresses in regards to the Ashley Madison hack and cautioned about false data and what might result from the release of that data.
Steve’s in-depth technical series for August was a two-part look at TXT records — what they are and how to use them — and he explains that the ways people use these, properly and improperly, can have a real impact on your sends.
In spam news, the self-proclaimed Spam King Sanford Wallace is still spamming, despite numerous judgments against him and his most recent guilty plea this month. For anyone else still confused about spam, the FTC answered some questions on the topic. It’s a good intro or refresher to share with colleagues. We also wrote about the impact of botnets on the inbox (TL;DR version: not much. The bulk of the problem for end users continues to be people making poor marketing decisions.) In other fraud news, we wrote about a significant spearphishing case and how DMARC may or may not help companies protect themselves.

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Mary Litynski Award winner Jayne Hitchcock

This morning the Messaging, Mobile and Malware Anti-Abuse Working Group announced the winner of the Mary Litynski Award.
Congratulations to Jayne Hitchcock of WHO@ for her work over the last 2 decades fighting online abuse and cyberstalking.
I’ve never actually met Jayne, but I do remember following her story in the late 90s. She started off trying to protect people from being scammed by Woodside Literary Agency. In return for her work to inform and protect people the principals of Woodside set out on a multi-year harassment campaign against her.
This was in the late 90s and the Internet was very new. There weren’t any laws. There weren’t really abuse desks. We had to protect each other. Law enforcement didn’t know what to do with problems. There weren’t any laws against harassment online. The word “cyberstalking” was created by a reporter when describing what was happening to Jayne.
Jayne has been a force for good online and she and her volunteers help people who are victims of abuse online and cyberstalking. She’s been instrumental in getting anti-cyberstalking laws passed and helping law enforcement understand why online abuse is an issue and that it should be addressed.

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Are botnets really the spam problem?

Over the last few years I’ve been hearing some people claim that botnets are the real spam problem and that if you can find a sender then they’re not a problem. Much of this is said in the context of hating on Canada for passing a law that requires senders actually get permission before sending email.
Botnets are a problem online. They’re a problem in a lot of ways. They can be used for denial of service attacks. They can be used to mine bitcoins. They can be used to host viruses. They can be used to send spam. They are a problem and a lot of people spend a lot of time and money trying to take down botnets.
For the typical end user, though, botnets are a minor contributor to spam in the inbox. Major ISPs, throughout the world, have worked together to address botnets and minimize the spam traffic from them. Those actions have been effective and many users never see botnet spam in their inbox, either because it’s blocked during send or blocked during receipt.
Most of the spam end users have to deal with is coming from people who nominally follow CAN SPAM. They have a real address at the bottom of the email. They’re using real ISPs or ESPs. They have unsubscribe links. Probably some of the mail is going to opt-in recipients. This mail is tricky, and expensive, to block, so a lot more of it gets through.
Much of this mail is sent by companies using real ISP connections. Brian Krebs, who I’ve mentioned before, wrote an article about one hosting company who previously supported a number of legal spammers. This hosting company was making $150,000 a month by letting customers send CAN SPAM legal mail. But the mail was unwanted enough that AOL blocked all of the network IP space – not just the spammer space, but all the IP space.
It’s an easy decision to block botnet sources. The amount of real mail coming from botnet space is zero. It’s a much bigger and more difficult decision to block legitimate sources of emails because there’s so much garbage coming from nearby IPs. What AOL did is a last resort when it’s clear the ISP isn’t going to stop spam coming out from their space.
Botnets are a problem. But quasi legitimate spammers are a bigger problem for filter admins and end users. Quasi legitimate spammers tend to hide behind ISPs and innocent customers. Some send off shared pools at ESPs and hide their traffic in the midst of wanted mail. They’re a bigger problem because the mail is harder to filter. They are bigger problems because a small portion of their recipients actually do want their mail. They’re bigger problems because some ISPs take their money and look the other way.
Botnets are easy to block, which makes them a solved problem. Spam from fixed IPs is harder to deal with and a bigger problem for endusers and filters.

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