I’m hearing hints that there are some malware or phishing links being sent out to gmail address books, “from” those gmail addresses. If that is what’s happening then it’s much the same thing as has been happening at Yahoo for a while, and AOL more recently, and that triggered their deployment of DMARC p=reject records. It’s going to be interesting to see what...
Over at ReturnPath Christine has an excellent non-technical summary of the DMARC+Yahoo situation, along with some solid recommendations for what actions you might take to avoid the operational problems it can cause.
Compared with some of the more complex pieces of the email protocol the From: header seems deceptively simple. But I’ve heard several people be confused about what it’s made up of over the past couple of months, so I thought I’d dig a bit deeper into how it’s defined and how it’s used in practice. Here’s a simple example: There are two interesting...
I was going to post about SSL certification and setup today, but the security world got ahead of me. Recent versions of openssl – the library used by most applications to implement SSL – released over the past couple of years have a critical bug in them. This bug lets any attacker read any information from the process that’s running SSL, reliably, silently and without leaving...
There are quite a lot of NTP-amplified denial of service attacks going around at the moment targeting tech and ecommerce companies, including some in the email space. What does NTP-amplifed mean? NTP is “Network Time Protocol” – it allows computers to set their clocks based on an accurate source, and keep them accurate. It’s very widely used – OS X and Windows...
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.
It’s a new year, but an old problem. Email with unloaded images. Sure, you should be including critical content as text, and/or including alt-text as a normal part of your creative design process, but at the bare minimum you should look at what your mail looks like without images. The last thing you want to do is send out email with just one strong call to action – the unsubscribe...
“Sending an email is one of the worst things you can do to a person. You are stealing a little part of their life away. 99.99% of all emails are incredibly annoying and a huge imposition. If your job is to write emails, you should always be fighting to send fewer things and make sure each email you send is so incredible that it’s a rare treat to hear from you.”
Cards Against Humanity at MailChimp
Spamhaus wrote about the return of open relays yesterday. What they’re seeing today matches what I see: there is fairly consistent abuse of open relays to send spam. As spam problems go it’s not as serious as compromised machines or abuse-tolerant ESPs / ISPs/ freemail providers – either in terms of volume or user inbox experience – but it’s definitely part of the...
Eggs, ham, sausage and spam. Some say the Internet is for porn; but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam. As communication technologies got cheaper, the cost of grabbing a megaphone and jamming it up against the aching ear-drums of an advertising-jaded public collapsed: Meanwhile, the content-is-king mantra of the monetization mavens gridlocked the new media in an advertising-supported...
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