A decade or so ago it was fairly rare for cryptography and email technology to intersect – there was S/MIME (which I’ve seen described as having “more implementations than users”) and PGP, which was mostly known for adding inscrutable blocks of text to mail and for some interesting political fallout, but not much else. That’s changing, though. Authentication and...
Make Mail.app work for you
Mark Nottingham (@mnot) posted a good idea to twitter: Highlight e-mails that your MTA receives with TLS. Make sure to include your mail server’s name in the value (here to the left of what’s shown) Mail.app has client support for mail routing rules. Out of the box all they’re configured to do is highlight mail from Apple, but Mark is adding a rule to passively...
Dealing with compromised user accounts
M3AAWG is on a roll lately with published documents. They recently released the Compromised User ID Best Practices (pdf link).
Content based filtering
Content filtering is often hard to explain to people, and I’m not sure I’ve yet come up with a good way to explain it. A lot of people think content reputation is about specific words in the message. The traditional content explanation is that words like “Free” or too many exclamation points in the subject line are bad and will be filtered. But it’s not the words...
IP Reputation
A throwback post from a few years ago on IP reputation. Why IP addresses? ISPs built reputation around IP addresses because it was one bit of data that malicious senders / spammers couldn’t forge. The connecting IP is a fundamental part of the network transaction and if you forge an IP then SMTP can’t work. Because that was the reliable data they had to work with, that’s what they used. Even now...
Who didn't invent email?
Who didn’t invent email? Shiva Ayyadurai. He’s not the only one – I didn’t invent email either, nor did Abraham Lincoln, Boadicea or Tim Berners-Lee. So why mention Shiva? He claims that in 1978 when he was 14, he took some courses in programming. His mum worked for the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and one of her colleagues challenged him to write an...
Changing your email address
Over at Mediapost, Loren McDonald talks about how hard it’s been to change his email address when his employer got bought out.
August 2014: The Month in Email
Isn’t August the month where things are supposed to slow down? We’re still waiting for that to happen around here… it’s been great to be busy, but we’re hoping to continue to carve out more time for blogging as we move into the fall. As usual, we reported on a mix of industry trends and news, the persistence of spam, and did a deep dive into an interesting technical topic. Let’s start there:...
The origins of network email
The history of long distance communication is a fascinating, and huge, subject. I’m going to focus just on the history of network email – otherwise I’m going to get distracted by AUTODIN and semaphore and facsimile and all sorts of other telegraphy. Electronic messaging between users on the same timesharing computer was developed fairly soon after time-sharing computer systems...