It’s been a great conference, and it’s only about half done. As is common at these conferences, I write down lots of things we should do and need to publish. The difference is now that we are growing I may have the time to put the polish on them and get them published. Today’s keynote discussed the economics of botnet mitigation. Michel van Eeten from Delft University of...
The Mary Litynski Award is presented by M3AAWG to people who have done extensive work outside the public eye over a significant period of time. At the Dublin conference the award was presented to Rodney Joffe. A lot of other people will talk about Rodney’s accomplishments, including his role in the founding of Genuity, his work with the DMA in the early days of spam, his efforts against SMS...
Greetings from Dublin, where we’re gearing up for M3AAWG adventures. In the blog this month, we did a post on purchased lists that got a lot of attention. If you’ve been reading the blog for any length of time, you know how I feel about purchased lists — they perform poorly and cause delivery problems, and we always advise clients to steer clear. With your help, we’ve now compiled a list of...
PTR records are easy to over look and they have a significant impact on your ability to deliver mail without them. Some ISP and mailbox providers will reject mail from IP addresses that do not have a PTR record created. PTR records are a type of DNS record that resolves an IP address to a fully qualified domain name or FQDN. The PTR records are also called Reverse DNS records. If you are...
Our formerly feral cat was diagnosed with hyperthyroid disease earlier this year. This week she went in for treatment with radioactive iodine. Now that she’s home, we have some minor safety precautions (mostly around keeping radiation out of landfills and minimizing our exposure) for the next 2 weeks. In previous careers, both Steve and I have been licensed to work with radioactivity so...
Almost 2 years ago I wrote a blog post titled The Death of IP Based Reputation. These days I’m even more sure that IP based reputation is well and truly dead for legitimate senders. There are a lot of reasons for this continued change. Improved computing power I touched on the increase in computing power in my 2013 post. The power and the complexity of filters in even greater now than then...
I received mail from Mitusbishi UK over the weekend, telling me that as a subscriber I was eligible to buy a car from one of their dealers, or something. I didn’t actually read the whole thing. While I am competent in a right hand drive, even when it’s a manual, it’s not something I want to try over here in the US. The address the message came to is one that I’ve had for...
Yahoo has updated their FAQ and listed out a number of factors they use to determine if a mail message is spam. IP Address Reputation URL Reputation Domain Reputation Sender Reputation DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) signatures DMARC authentication Autonomous System Number (ASN) reputation Autonomous System Number (ASN) is a globally unique number that is assigned to a group of IP networks...
40% of iCloud users were affected this morning during a service disruption between 2:15AM and 9:30AM. Apple System Status
I use tom@hotmail.com as my default bogus email address. Tom has subscribed to so many things because of me. This is why address verification doesn’t work. The address tom@hotmail.com is a real address. It exists. It accepts mail. And at least one person admits to signing up Tom for mail that the person doesn’t want. I’m sure he’s not the only one. <- 250 OK -> MAIL...
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