While we were at M3AAWG, Wired published an article talking about how simple it was to crack DKIM keys. I didn’t post about it at the time because it didn’t really seem like news. DKIM keys smaller than 1024 are vulnerable and not secure and the DKIM spec does not recommend using keys smaller than 1024. When I asked the DKIM-people-who-would-know they did tell me that the news was...
Marketing and storms
Never let it be said that marketers can’t take advantage of anything. In this case, there was a lot of commercial email mentioning Hurricane Sandy sent over the last few days. The emails themselves mapped into a number of broad categories. Informational: Emails from hotels, airlines and east coast businesses keeping customers updated about their current status. Emails from many banks also...
Storms, outages and email
There’s been quite a bit of discussion about how Hurricane (Superstorm?) Sandy has affected email delivery over the last week. There are a couple things that may affect delivery at a number of domains. Receiving mailservers hosted in facilities that lost power or connectivity for one reason or another. Most of these issues seem to be resolved now, although a number of places are still on...
It's Thursday: AOL must be having problems
And, in fact, they are. This time I’m seeing random reports of FBL failures. Some folks are seeing a significant (more than 50%) decrease in FBL emails. Other folks are reporting FBL reports that aren’t really FBL reports, but instead look like failed code output. If you’re seeing this kind of problems it’s not just you. As always, people at AOL are working to fix things...
Poisoning Spamtraps
Today’s question comes from Dave in yesterday’s comment section. I wonder if spammers might submit harvested addresses to big-name companies known to not use confirmed opt-in just to poison what they believe might be spamtraps? It’s certainly possible that people submit addresses to forms and big-name companies. But I don’t really think that poisons the spamtrap. Depending...
Harvesting and forging email addresses
For the contact address on our website, Steve has set up a rotating set of addresses. This is to minimize the amount of spam we have to deal with coming from address harvesters. This has worked quite well. In fact it works so well I didn’t expect that publishing an email address for taking reader questions would generate a lot of spam. Boy, was I wrong. That address has been on the website...
MAAWG presents the first J.D. Falk award
Last week at MAAWG went much like all MAAWG conferences go: too much to do, too many interesting panels to attend, too many people to connect and work with, a plethora of very interesting keynote speakers and a total lack of sleep. Most of what happens at MAAWG is not public, but some of the events are. One of the things that I can talk about is the J.D. Falk award. This award was established by...
Setting up DNS for sending email
Email – and email filtering – makes a lot of use of DNS, and it’s fairly easy to miss something. Here are a few checklists to help: Data you need before you start: [table] Information,for example Return path / bounce address,bounces.myesp.com Mailserver hostname,mail4.myesp.com Mailserver external address,192.0.2.4 DKIM “d=”,greatbigmarketer.com DKIM selector,oct2012...
Retrying mail to AOL
I’m working on stuff for MAAWG so I’m really not all that up on what’s happening in the world of email recently. A lot of folks are commenting on my AOL post, and I’m hearing that queues are backing up and emptying as AOL makes changes. One thing people have been asking me is if they should retry mail to the addresses that are bouncing. I say yes, absolutely. Some of the...
Mail problems at AOL
We cannot help endusers troubleshoot AOL connection problems. Please do not call. Please do not write. You need to talk to AOL. We are not AOL. We cannot help you. Over the last few months there have been ongoing mail problems at AOL. These problems are all over the map and are resulting in a lot of delayed and unsent email. People are reporting a number of different error messages from...