I did a class at M3AAWG teaching the basic mechanics of sending an email, both really by hand using dig and netcat, and using SWAKS. No slides, but if you’re interested in the script I’ve posted a very rough copy of my working notes here.
Tools that you run from the command line – i.e. from a terminal or shell window – are often more powerful and quicker to use than their GUI or web equivalents. Their output is plain text so it’s much easier to copy and paste into an email or a slack conversation – sure, you can take a screenshot of a GUI tool and share that, but then the folks you’re sharing it with...
A while back I wrote about Apple Mail Privacy Protection, what it does and how it works. Since MPP was first announced I’d assumed that it would be built on the same infrastructure as iCloud Private Relay, Apple’s VPN product, but hadn’t seen anything from Apple to explicitly connect the two and didn’t have access to enough data to confirm it independently. But the nice...
You’ve probably heard about Apple Mail Privacy Protection. Email marketing chat has been all a-twitter about it since it was announced in June. Skipping over all the “Openpocalypse” panic, what is it and what does it do? Image Loads It’s all about images in email and how they’re loaded (particularly invisible one pixel images that are used solely for tracking). Why...
— @TwistedDoodles
In the 1970s, while the early drafts of the Internet were being developed, a competing model for networking was being put together by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization). The OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) Model broke the work needed to implement a distributed network service into seven separate layers of abstraction, from the physical infrastructure at layer one all the...
Some notes on some of the different protocols used for authentication and authentication-adjacent things in email. Some of this is oral history, and some of it may be contradicted by later or more public historical revision. SPF Associates an email with a domain that takes responsibility for it. Originally Sender Permitted From, now Sender Policy Framework. It allows a domain owner to announce...
For a long time one of the “best practices” for links in html content has been to avoid having anything that looks like a URL or hostname in the visible content of the link, as ISP phishing filters are very, very suspicious of links that seem to mislead recipients about where the link goes to. They’re a very common pattern in phishing emails. /* This is bad: */ <a href="">>...
It’s not too difficult to build your own link redirector, perhaps a few hours work for a basic implementationme, yesterday Yesterday I suggested that link tracking wasn’t too complex, but didn’t really have anything to back the claim up. And nobody trusts developer time estimates. So I cranked DEF CON Radio and wrote a dedicated click-tracking webserver, mostly as a demo of how to use...
Almost every bulk mail sent includes some sort of instrumentation to track which users click on which links and when. That’s usually done by the ESP rewriting links in the content so they point at the ESP’s tracking server, and include information about the customer, campaign and recipient. The recipient clicks on the link in the email, their web browser fetches the link from the...
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