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September 7, 2017

Equifax compromise and their insecure response

By laura

5 Min read

6 comments

07September

Today it was announced that someone infiltrated Equifax earlier this year and stole 143,000,000 identities. These identities include names, birthdates, and addresses, at a minimum. Details are available at your favorite news site. What I want to talk about is the website they’ve put up to address the issue. This website is Yet Another Example of how the financial services industry trains...

September 6, 2017

Who didn't invent email, part 2

By laura

2 Min read

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06September

Back in 2014, Steve wrote an article discussing Shiva Ayyadurai,and his claims that he was the inventor of email. In that article he links to a number of articles from Techdirt. Earlier this year, Shiva sued Floor64, the parent company of Techdirt, as well as Michael Massnick the Founder, CEO and editor and Leigh Beadon, a writer for Techdirt. (Original Complaint pdf from ReCAP). Ars Technica has...

September 5, 2017

Improving Gmail Delivery

By laura

3 Min read

2 comments

05September

Lately I’m hearing a lot of people talk about delivery problems at Gmail. I’ve written quite a bit about Gmail (Another way Gmail is different, Gmail filtering in a nutshell, Poor delivery at Gmail but no where else, Insight into Gmail filtering) over the last year and a half or so. But those articles all focus on different parts of Gmail delivery and it’s probably time for a...

September 4, 2017

Spam-infused Mai-Tai

By steve

1 Min read

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04September

Happy Labor Day! Celebrate it with the perfect email-themed cocktail – a spam-infused Mai Tai, served in the traditional glass. A speciality of the Duck Inn in Chicago, it’s made from a fat-washed dark rum: Slice Spam thin and lay the slices onto a small sheet pan. Cover with 5oz of melted lard. Bake at 250 degrees for one hour, or until the Spam is thoroughly browned. Fine strain...

August 31, 2017

A decade of blogging

By laura

2 Min read

4 comments

31August

August 2017 marks 10 years of blogging. In that time we’ve written almost 2200 posts. We’ve had millions of visitors. My first blog post was a bit of a cliche. The first real content on the blog was a post about the 7th circuit court of appeals ruling in the E360 v. Spamhaus lawsuit. I continued following that case for the next 4 years as various arguments, filings, and rulings were...

August 30, 2017

Mandatory TLS is coming

By steve

1 Min read

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30August

Well, not exactly mandatory but Chrome will start labeling any text or email form field on a non-TLS page as “NOT SECURE”. Chrome 62 will be released as stable some time around October 24th. If you want to avoid the customer support overhead then, regardless of whether any of the information on a form is sensitive, you should probably make sure that all your forms are accessible via...

August 28, 2017

Maybe they're just not that into you?

By steve

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28August

In April of last year I created a new twitter account. I can’t remember exactly why, but it was a throwaway created to look at some aspect of how twitter interacts with new accounts. As part of the account creation process I gave Twitter an email address. They sent me a confirmation message right away: I didn’t click the button. Four months later they sent me another confirmation...

August 23, 2017

Local-part Semantics

By steve

7 Min read

3 comments

23August

An email address has two main parts. The local-part is the bit before the @-sign and the domain is the bit after it. Loosely, the domain part tells SMTP how to get an email to the destination mailserver while the local part tells that server whose mailbox to put it in. I’m just looking at the local part today, the “steve” in “steve@example.com”. Talkin’...

August 22, 2017

Aug 21, 2017

By laura

1 Min read

2 comments

22August

August 17, 2017

August mini-recess

By laura

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17August

Blogging will be light through the end of the month. We’re headed to Wyoming to see the eclipse this weekend. As well, with all of the current political events happening it’s hard to focus on email right now. So basically I’m giving myself permission to not blog daily through the end of August. I’ll blog as I have stuff to say. Some of those might be copies and pastes from...