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Authentication

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.

Google IP reputation bad

This morning hundreds of delivery folks logged into their Google Postmaster Tools account to see their IP reputation was bad.

It’s not marketing… it’s harassment

Many years ago, we bought a VMWare license to manage the various virtual machines running our business infrastructure. As part of our move to Dublin, we decommissioned our cabinet and moved all of services into various bits of the cloud. This meant that when our VMWare support contract came up for renewal we declined the renewal.

4 beelion emails

Sendgrid announced their volumes for Black Friday and Cyber Monday:

It’s the email time of year…

I’m basically waiting for the various ESPs to announce Just How Much Mail they’ve sent over the last 4 days. Early information from one ESP shows a hefty percentage over the amount they sent last year, and that amount had many, many, many zeros in it.

There’s something about bounces

I’ve shared a version of this image repeatedly. I think it was only my Facebook friends that got the stick figure screaming in frustration, though.

Phishing evolves beyond DMARC

The phishing attack against Sendgrid is still going on. Most of the mail and the websites are being hosted on Linode. I’ve still not gotten to see what one of the sites looks like, as Linode is getting the sites down before I click on the links.

Alt-text and phishing warnings

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.

Myths about spamtraps

The nice folks at Kickbox asked me what I thought the biggest myths about spamtraps were. I said:

The internet is different in the EU

One of the interesting things about moving to the EU is experiencing the internet where GDPR is a thing. We get asked permission for everything. Including if we want shopping cart updates.

Recent Posts

Authentication

Google IP reputation bad

It’s not marketing… it’s harassment

4 beelion emails

It’s the email time of year…

There’s something about bounces

Phishing evolves beyond DMARC

Alt-text and phishing warnings

Myths about spamtraps

The internet is different in the EU

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