Authorsteve

October 20, 2015

DMARC News – Gmail p=reject and ARC

By steve
1 Min read
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20October

DMARC.org announced this morning that Gmail will be moving to publishing a p=reject DMARC record in June of next year, much the same as Yahoo and AOL have. Unlike Yahoo and AOL, Gmail are giving those who will be affected plenty of time to prepare for any issues, and have waited until there are some potential ways to mitigate problems in the development pipeline. The ARC proposal, mentioned in...

October 14, 2015

Network Solutions email issues

By steve
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14October

According to twitter and mailop Network Solutions is having issues with inbound mail, with both TCP level disconnections and 451 deferrals. @annaciamp @netsolcares We're seeing email from our servers to netsol queuing up, consistently since 9:51 am (U.S. Central) — Frank Bulk (@frankbulk) October 14, 2015 Down Detector and other reports suggest it’s been an issue since about 8am...

October 9, 2015

Lost in the mists of time

By steve
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09October

Over on the Farsight Security blog Joe St. Sauver talks about some of the early days of online abuse, on usenet. Laura and I were on the periphery of early usenet abuse, mostly as users, but Usenet (and IRC) around then were the places we both started with email abuse.

October 7, 2015

IPv6 and authentication

By steve
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07October

I just saw a post over on the mailop mailing list where someone had been bitten by some of the IPv6 email issues I discussed a couple of months ago. They have dual-stack smarthosts – meaning that their smarthosts have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, and will choose one or the other to send mail over. Some domains they send to use Office 365 and opted-in to receiving mail over IPv6, so their...

September 18, 2015

Two factor authentication

By steve
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18September

The drumbeat of “secure your accounts; help your customers secure their accounts with you” advice has faded away a bit, probably because we’ve not had a major ESP account compromise hit the media in the past few months. The costs – customer support, security, reputation, executive focus – of customer account compromises are still significant, anything you can easily...

September 17, 2015

Outrunning the Bear

By steve
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17September

You’ve started to notice that your campaigns aren’t working as well as they used to. Your metrics suggest fewer people are clicking through, perhaps because more of your mail is ending up in junk folders. Maybe your outbound queues are bigger than they used to be. You’ve not changed anything – you’re doing what’s worked well for years – and it’s not...

August 17, 2015

TXTing

By steve
6 Min read
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17August

On Friday I talked a bit about the history behind TXT records, their uses and abuses. But what’s in a TXT record? How is it used? When and where should you use them? Here’s what you get if you query for the TXT records for exacttarget.com from a unix or OS X command line with dig exacttarget.com txt ~ ∙ dig exacttarget.com txt ; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>>...

August 14, 2015

A brief history of TXT Records

By steve
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14August

When the Domain Name System was designed thirty years ago the concept behind it was pretty simple. It’s mostly just a distributed database that lets you map hostname / query-type pairs to values. If you want to know the IP address of cnn.com, you look up {cnn.com, A} and get back a couple of IP addresses. If you want to know where to send mail for aol.com users, you look up {aol.com, MX}...

July 29, 2015

IPv6 Email is a little different

By steve
5 Min read
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29July

On Monday I talked about how big IPv6 address space is, and how many IPv6 addresses will be available to end users. We’re mostly an email blog, though, so what’s the relevance to sending email? If the recipient you’re sending to has an IPv6 mailserver you can send mail to them over IPv6, if you choose to. If they only have an IPv6 mailserver, with no IPv4 mailserver at all then...

July 27, 2015

IPv6 is big

By steve
4 Min read
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27July

IPv6 is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to IPv6. The old Internet, the one you’re probably using right now, runs on IP version 4. IPv4 addresses have numbers and dots; they look like 172.224.4.56. There are about 4,009,754,624...

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